Then, with the water rising up toward his throat, Mason saw the banded, rust-coated iron of a door blocking the tunnel in front of him and the tidal surge of the river breaking against it.
He felt around beneath the surface for the handle he couldn’t see.
It wasn’t locked.
But even as he twisted it, praying silently that the door was hinged to open away from him, but none of the vast pantheons of gods were on his side. He pulled at the handle but sheer weight of the water pressing against it held it firm.
And Mason knew he was going to die there in that tunnel beneath the river and there was nothing he could do to save himself.
He stared around frantically as the water rose over his head, and lashing out, kicked upwards, desperate for just one more breath of air.
Chapter Sixty-Two
As the seams split, McCreedy’s wolf came raging out of the silver casket and swam toward the surface. The Thames was icy cold against his hide. He struck out for the bank, battling against the tidal surge of the river. It tore at his fur and flesh, hounding him as he scrabbled about for purchase on the bank. His claws skittered and scratched off the stone jetty, unable to get a grip before the swell dragged him back toward the middle of the river.
The wolf cast a frantic look back over his haunches.
Down river, in the direction of the sea, he saw, or thought he saw, the spume kicking up into breaking waves, each wave seemingly a little bigger than the last. The Thames was a tidal river but McCreedy couldn’t remember ever seeing proper waves break and roll along Parliament bank. Looking at the waves, it was no wonder that he couldn’t scramble ashore.
In a matter of moments he was battling exhaustion.
He had no way of knowing whether it was natural or the result of the Brethren chanting the beast out of his flesh. It didn’t matter. If he didn’t get out of the water it would kill him just the same. The shock of the icy cold on his heart was enough to slow it from the frantic dub-dub dub-dub dub-dub dub-dub to a rhythmic dub … dub … dub that was less than a third the rate of its regular beat. If he didn’t get out and get warm his entire system would go into hypothermic shock. He was shivering already.
The moon shimmered over the water, breaking into hundreds of silver pieces on the rippling surface.
Up on the bank above him McCreedy saw the shadows of men watching; they weren’t watching him but rather the river gathering its head. He felt the waves of cold emanating off them, even more frigid than the water itself, as if that were possible. He could hear their chanting rising again, a hypnotic counterpoint to the whispering shush of river, and wondered if they thought he were still trapped in his would-be coffin settling into the sludge at the bottom of the Thames. Were they counting out the time until it was safe to assume he had drowned?
Rather than frighten him, the thought invigorated McCreedy, giving him the strength he needed to battle back to the bank. His claws dragged across the moss-covered stone, scratching and scrabbling until he caught a hold, and then, tongue lolling between jowls, the wolf pulled himself slowly and silently up.
They never saw him coming …
Chapter Sixty-Three
The Ice Queen followed the bronze lions through the night city.
The fire in the sky had burned out, leaving darkness to reclaim the streets.
She walked quickly, skirts raised, bustling. Her hard soles scuffed the cobbles as she moved from shadow to light and back again, running through the puddles of gaslight lighting the narrow streets.
Occasional streaks of flame rippled over her head adding to the strange shadow play.
She left a rime of frost in her wake.
This was her city but it wasn’t. So much was the same, so many little things familiar, but for every similarity she saw a dozen striking differences that told her beyond any shadow of doubt that she was a long way from home. She felt the girl beneath her—inside her—fighting against her presence. She was strong. The Ice Queen had to exert the full force of her iron will to keep the girl’s consciousness at bay. Of course, that same strength made her all the more potent and malleable in the Queen’s hands, granting Victoria an unexpected wellspring of The Art to tap at will. She wormed her way into the girl’s thoughts with tendrils of ice that seeped in through every bare inch of flesh it came into contact with. The ice melted just enough to allow it to penetrate the pores and work its way into the girl’s bloodstream, then pump through the veins and arteries to the ventricles of her heart and then around her system again into the brain until the two of them began slowly to become one on a fundamental level. Her essence flooding into the girl’s brain offered the Ice Queen a conduit to her thoughts. The first thing she learned was her name. The girl’s mind screamed it out again and again, clinging on to her identity under Victoria’s assault: Emily Sheridan. The girl was of no particular station, and other than her newfound talent, was utterly unremarkable. Of course even the slightest glimmering of The Art raised her up above the majority of the population in a way that wealth or breeding never could. Her gift made her quite, quite remarkable.
The lion stopped in its tracks and began to prowl back and forth in a cagy lope. She didn’t recognise the streets it had led her to, but she knew where they were all the same. The place reeked of poverty and hunger. With morning coming the Mudlarks were already rising, ready to scavenge along the river banks for cargo thrown overboard from the tall ships moored from Jacob’s Island, Rotherhithe and Shadwell all the way to the Mill Bank and Nine Elms on the other side of the Thames’s horseshoe curve. They were close to the Ludgate, Temple, and the shadow of the Tower. Her sense of her place in this world was good. For all of its differences the geography of this place was almost identical to the geography of her own London. The city wall lay to the east of her, holding back the hunger and desperation from the ”Square Mile” of the City of London proper. It was the thriving heart of both places. She could see the cupola of Christopher Wren’s great cathedral. She thought for a moment that she could see creatures crawling across the top of the great dome, like shadows or ghosts, but as she shook her head her vision cleared and she realised that what she took for ghosts and daemons was nothing more sinister than a fractured shadow flitting across the moon.
She looked up to see birds.
Not just one or ten or even fifty but hundreds of them.
Ravens.
Flocking.
There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their flight as they flew frantically into each other’s trajectories, tumbling out of the sky only to rise again. But, as they flew across the moon’s face once more she saw she was wrong. They seemed to be forming a face across the moon; no, not a face, she realised as the features began to morph, turning the silver back-glow into haunting eye sockets and the cavity where nose and mouth ought to have been into a death’s head rictus.
And for a moment she thought she knew the face.
There was something familiar about it, hauntingly so. Had she seen it before? Where? It came to her: she had seen it once before, worn by a ghost. She tried to think when, precisely, but it was difficult. Had it been during the worst minutes of her life? It would make sense if it had. She could remember being in her chamber tending Albert on his deathbed. Yes, when she focussed on the memory she could see more details: she had looked up and could have sworn she had seen the ghost watching her. She knew that face, how could she not? But even as the birds broke and scattered away from the moon she realised she wasn’t the one who recognised the face, Emily did. The tendrils of ice melted to all the more thoroughly seep into the girl’s mind, absorbing the very essence of her. Emily knew the man. Images flashed across her mind’s eye, of the man on a sumptuous divan bed, of a tapestry burning, the man holding his face crying that he was blind, and now the Ice Queen knew him as well. She found his name in those other memories, Dorian Carruthers.
That was unexpected.
He had been there when she came through to this realm, and now psychopompos were f
orming his face in the night sky. Interesting. So the blind man is a gatekeeper, is he? she thought, mulling over the implications of the realization.
She looked away from the ravens to see the bronze lion studying her. The lion lowered its head as though it could read her mind and understood both her confusion and, deeper, her grief. Perhaps it could. There were more things, as the Bard said, so why not an empathic bronze lion?
In the distance she heard the trailing edge of screams.
The great Golem hove into sight, towering over the city.
Her breath caught in her throat.
She knew this construct—more than simply knew it, she had commissioned it, so so many years ago.
This was Augustus Pugin’s greatest creation.
Forget the glory of God, this was the Glory of London.
The architect’s grand design had called for the Golem to represent the sum of all men, all faiths, all dreams and desires to be made flesh. He called it Father London and raised the Golem on the far side of the river, near to the Lime House, where traditionally the dead had been left to rot in the days of the plague. In the final days of its construction Pugin had brought in the Archbishop of Westminster to consecrate it just as he would a cemetery field. He had intended it as a guardian to watch over the dead souls between this life and the next. The word he had used was psychopompos; she hadn’t known what it meant, but that had been thirty years ago, now she was all too familiar with not only the word but its many totems. Father London had stood mute and immobile watching over those far dark fields for all these long years. She had never thought to see it move.
And without the intervention of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the spirit medium, it never would.
Blavatsky was an Artist in the purest sense of the word, though in the ancient Egyptian fashion she called it the Heka, after the essence of soul. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine changed everything. The medium found a way to reconcile the Heka with the modern scientific world. Father London was just that. Her inner circle of twelve handpicked disciples, had at her behest carved the streets of greatest city in Christendom into Father London’s doughy white flesh, and that they had done so was neither vandalism nor mere affectation. The twelve men and women had worked tirelessly night and day for nigh on two years rendering the city with minute perfection into Father London’s skin. Blavatsky had come to Victoria and claimed that she had dreamt of Pugin’s construct, seeing it stride between worlds, that had been enough for the Ice Queen. Blavatsky had taught her lessons of the Prime Material and the endless plains and oblique cities, and when her beloved Albert had died, it was Blavatsky who promised hope. Infinite London’s meant infinite Albert’s; somewhere, in one of those worlds he had to be whole and healthy, Blavatsky explained, and Victoria needed to believe her. With Father London they could bring him home.
Everything she did, she did for love.
Blavatsky’s carvings bound the Golem to Mother London. The Ice Queen did not know how The Art was manipulated to bring the construct to life, she didn’t need to know, she was not The Artist, she was merely the monarch. But bring it to life it did, and alive it was capable of tearing a path between the oblique cities.
It was quite something to see it now, striding towards her so full of life.
What she could not know was that The Artist, Blavatsky, had her own motivations for animating Father London. Motivations that went far beyond rescuing a single soul from some parallel city for some lonely old woman. Motivations that had had her carve soul-entrapment glyphs into the construct’s inner layers of skin and deep into its iron bones. Neither could she know that after her death the surviving disciples of Blavatsky’s inner circle had taken to calling themselves the Brethren, nor that they intended to honour her last words: to keep the link unbroken and not allow her last incarnation be a failure whilst they sought a new vessel for her soul so that she might return in all of her glory, Isis reincarnated.
Heka.
Literally, the word meant activating the Ka.
The lion roared.
And down by the river ravens attacked Father London.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Far beneath the river, Mason’s lungs burned and his vision swam. He blinked frantically as the water stung his eyes. Lips pressed to the very last pocket of air, he swallowed what would be his last breath greedily and spat out the black water that spilled into his mouth, then submerged. He couldn’t feel his extremities. The freezing water was his world now. His coat rippled around him in the water as he kicked out, reaching for the door. There was no air left in the tunnel, and no air left in his lungs. There was no going back up to the surface because there was no surface to go back to. He knew he would have to open his mouth eventually and suck in lungfuls of water. It was inevitable. He fought down the rising tide of panic. It wouldn’t help him, it would only kill him all the faster.
Drowning was supposed to be a pleasant way to die, the slow starvation of oxygen to the brain dimming the senses almost like an opiate haze, but there was nothing remotely pleasant about the fear that ushered the haze in. His mind raced. He was not dead yet, not while there was still that final breath in his lungs. He clawed at the iron door but there was no way in hell fingernails were going to pierce the iron cladding. He could not even beat it; the water resistance slowed his angry fists down, robbing them off all their strength.
He pushed away from the iron door in frustration.
Mason caught a glimpse of the glass tube and brass handle of the Blondel Distillator lying on the floor beneath him beside Mercy. He must have dropped the weapons in his frantic fight to swim against the flood. He had no recollection of letting them go. His first instinct was to swim for the sword; perhaps he could work the blade into the jamb and break the hasp of the lock or something, but even as his hand closed around the hilt he changed his mind and reached down with his other hand, clasping the Distillator to his burning chest.
Mason aimed the weapon at the door.
He had no way of knowing what would happen. The Distillator drew the water out of its target, making it lethal against living organisms. Sixty per cent of the adult male’s body was water. Very few things could stand to lose sixty per cent of their being and survive. If the water had seeped beneath the door to the other side, the Distillator could, he hoped, draw the water through the iron, agitating the barrier on an atomic level, but it would be a case of wait and see as to whether it would be enough to explode the iron. Of course, the door was iron, a conductor, and in drawing the water out of its targets, the Distillator generated intense electric fields. Water, electricity and iron didn’t mix well. The chances were, in pulling the trigger Mason would set into motion a chain reaction that would fry him alive.
He had to breathe.
The need to open his mouth was overwhelming. He gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to gasp, knowing that it would kill him. A stream of bubbles rose from his nostrils.
He squeezed the trigger.
A ribbon of bluish energy pulsed out from the muzzle and through the water, breaking and spreading across the rusted iron door. The water around the pulse sizzled and spat, thinner ribbons of diluted blue-light energy arcing out towards the corrugated iron cladding lining the walls and electrifying the entire tunnel. Where the energy fractured through the water, the body of water itself shrank back, forming airless snakes of vacuum that writhed toward the iron door and the iron walls. Where the vacuum-snakes came into contact with one and other they merged to form larger vacuum pockets, and where the pockets came into contact they bloated to form a water void in front of the door.
It could have been a trick of the water messing with his perception, but he could have sworn he could see the iron bulging against its hinges, and even as the last raft of bubbles escaped his lips, emptying his lungs, despair gripped him. The vacuum wasn’t strong enough break the door’s hinges. His free hand went to his mouth as though cupping it could somehow filter the water and allow him to breathe.
Mason opened his mouth, swallowing his first mouthful of water.
He was as good as dead.
There was no point fighting it.
He let the Distillator slip between his fingers and swam forward into the water void, thinking the absence of water meant the presence of air. It didn’t.
But, with the energy stream broken, the water surged around him, rushing to fill the void. It was nature at its most furious. The abhorrence of the vacuum in its heart was elemental, irresistible.
It was also lethal: a water hammer.
In a barrage of white sound he heard the wave crash against the door. The boom resounded through the water-filled tunnel, carried by percussive waves that washed back over him, bullying him backwards even as the water hammer hurled him at the iron door.
Before he cannoned off it, the door was ripped off its hinges and exploded outwards, twisted beyond all recognition, and carried by the relentless momentum of the water hammer, Mason tumbled and sprawled into the passageway beyond the door. Mercy lay on the first step of a stone staircase ten feet beyond him. The Blondel Distillator lay in the water below it. Coughing his lungs up, Mason stumbled toward the stairs while the water rushed in behind him.
He stooped to grab the Distillator. The glass tube had a deep fissure running through it and the brass muzzle was buckled out of true. He stuffed it into his saturated coat pocket and grasped the sword in his right hand. Mason ran up the stairs two and three at a time. There was a second door blocking the way at the top, but this one was wooden and no amount of oak was going to stop him escaping the tunnel. He hit it hard, shoulder slamming into the wood beside the lock mechanism—once, twice, and on the third try, fire blazing through his body, Mason burst through it, staggering under his own momentum as he stumbled into the room beyond.
The first thing that hit him was the astringent reek; within seconds his eyes burned from the bite of ammoniac in the air. He looked around frantically trying to work out where in God’s name he was. It took another few seconds to realise the dark shapes he saw within the shadows were makeshift coffins, and a few seconds more to realise they were occupied.
London Macabre Page 25
