He shuffled back through the sheets of paper, looking again for references to the soul. It was there, on every page somewhere.
He was skilled enough with the mechanics of The Art to be able to decipher half of the glyphs and sigils that had been sketched out on the sheaf of papers, but he was logical enough to know that everything on the table was somehow linked, and what linked it was the giant iron Soul Golem Blavatsky had christened Father London. He was also logical enough to assume that whatever could be made could just as easily be unmade.
He folded the pages up quickly and stuffed them into the back of his trousers, adjusting his belt to synch the firmly in place. He wanted Dorian to read them, or Fabian, either one of them would have seen through the hocus pocus and grasped instinctively what was going on with the formulae. But he didn’t have Dorian or Fabian to fall back on, so either he had to decipher it, or one of the others did. Of course, there was always the possibility that the blueprints were useless and they wouldn’t find a weakness in the construct’s design in time to save the city from its rampaging feet.
Locke crept out of the Reading Room and across the landing to the Smoking Room. Just like their own haven, this place was sumptuous, decorated with old-school luxury. An ivory letter opener lay on a small writing desk, the scrimshaw work of the handle exquisite. It took Locke a moment to realise what was hidden within the intricate detail: gods. All of the Egyptian deities were represented in the bone. He put it back down on the red leather surface of the desk, letting his fingers linger on the cold bone blade.
Something on one of the bookshelves beside the open fire caught his eye.
The shelves themselves were empty, save for a few trinkets, but Locke was drawn to a small, silver heraldic shield that had been hammered into the dark wood with a silver nail. The shield was crudely engraved with the McCreedy clan markings. The sight of it coupled with Napier’s portrait downstairs turned everything he thought he knew upside down. Locke reached out and touched the small shield. Was it possible that the big man was a traitor to the cause? Had they turned him? It didn’t bear thinking about.
No, Locke shook his head. It was impossible to think that McCreedy had been turned. The man was as steadfast and loyal to the pack as the wolf in his blood was. No, this thing, this shield, was part of some sort of incantation aimed at McCreedy. It had to be. That was the only thing that made sense. Did that mean Napier was also under some sort of enchantment?
He used the letter opener to pry the shield away from the wood and pocketed it, hoping that would be enough to break whatever hoodoo it was they’d placed on his friend. If not, at least they had the shield and could reverse-engineer a solution from it when they had dealt with Father London.
Locke scanned the eerily familiar room, and it was eerily familiar, he realised, seeing the same hand-rolled cigar butts in the ashtray that McCreedy liked to suck on. The same broadsheet newspapers lay on the side tables. No doubt if he had checked the drinks cabinet he would have seen identical bottles of brandy, cognac and wine waiting to be drunk. Even the dumbwaiter beside the serving hatch was the same, right down to the emblem of the Order of the Garter and the inscription Honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil to him who evil thinks … He suppressed a shiver. The Brethren were living their lives. What better way to understand your enemy than to be your enemy? He began to appreciate just how far the Brethren had gone toward understanding them.
Somewhere somewhen someone walked over his grave.
And this time Brannigan Locke did shiver.
How could they know them like this?
How could they know the insides of the lodging house well enough to recreate it with such an eye for the details?
It betrayed a level of familiarity with their inner sanctum that no outsider could possibly have—unless they had been inside, not once, but on many occasions. He thought again of Napier’s portrait downstairs. Had he betrayed them? Was it possible?
Locke heard something outside the room: a floorboard groaning under shifting weight.
He had been so wrapped up in thoughts of betrayal he’d allowed his concentration to slip. He cursed himself. He had known the Sanctuary would be protected. He didn’t want to imagine what was on the other side of the door. But he couldn’t help himself. Frantically, he looked around the room for a weapon with which to defend himself. His eyes darted toward the desk and the ivory letter opener, but it was hardly threatening enough to hold back any serious attack. Then his gaze ran over the still-glowing coals in the fire grate. He allowed himself the luxury of a slight smile as he rushed across the room to grab the iron poker from the rack beside the fire. He wasn’t beaten yet. His mind raced. Looking over his shoulder toward the closed door, he plunged the poker into the still-glowing coals. There was nowhere near enough latent heat left to turn the metal red hot, but The Art could do the rest.
Whoever it was out there had given up the pretence of keeping their presence quiet. They prowled the landing, back and forth, back and forth. He could hear every floorboard creaking slowly under their weight.
But for some reason they weren’t coming inside the room.
They didn’t need to, he realised. They were keeping him penned in. There was nowhere he could go. All they had to do was wait for their masters to return and he was done for. Moving as slowly and quietly as he could, Locke crept toward the door. He didn’t know what he intended to do, but the notion of throwing it open and fighting his way out had a certain basic appeal.
He reached the door and stopped with his hand on the brass handle.
He could hear heavy breathing through the wood.
Panting.
Like a dog.
It couldn’t be that simple could it? A guard dog?
He hefted the poker, ready to come out swinging.
But something stopped him from throwing the door open.
Instead, he crouched, pressing his eye to the keyhole.
For a moment he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but it wasn’t a dog for all that slick black fur glistened in the flickering blush of the gaslights on the landing. It prowled on two legs, not four, and had the well-sculptured body of an athlete, very definitely a man despite the coat of fur. He couldn’t see its face.
Then the creature stooped, leaning in to stare at his eye through the keyhole and he knew exactly what—or rather who—was on the other side of the door, as the jackal-head came into sight.
Anubis.
The Death God.
Locke stared.
He couldn’t help himself.
His heart raced.
He could smell The Art on the jackal-headed god. It wasn’t merely rich or heady. It was alive. The air around Anubis crackled as the thing leaned forward, sniffing at the lock. It could smell him, he realised. It could smell him behind the door. He didn’t dare breathe. The god’s snout twitched, whiskers bristling as it inhaled his fear. It reached toward him, placing a clawed hand against the door. There was less than an inch between the Death God’s claws and his face. Anubis scratched at the door, digging at the wood. There was no way the door could hold it if Anubis attacked, but for now, mercifully, the creature seemed content to remain a guardian at the threshold. Locke swallowed hard. Fine filigrees of dark matter arced and dissipated within its piercing black eyes as Anubis glared back through the keyhole.
There was no way he could fight his way out of the room, not with a god waiting for him on the other side of the door.
Locke backed away carefully, praying he wouldn’t make a sound.
He looked around the room. The sash windows were a possibility, he thought, moving toward them, but even before he was halfway across the room he remembered just how far down it was to the street. He couldn’t very well jump. He wasn’t Spring Heeled Jack. Could he climb down? He tried to visualise the outside of the Sanctuary, the brickwork, the guttering, ledges, footholds, fingerholds and of course, the watcher. All the while Anubis scratched at the door, and each long, slow raking sound of the god’
s claws dragging through the wood might as well have been them grating up against his soul.
There was no other way out of the Smoking Room. No, that wasn’t true, Locke realised. There was no other door but that didn’t mean there wasn’t another way out of the room. He moved quickly now, with a singular purpose: survival. He dragged one of the heavy Chesterfield armchairs to barricade the door, for all the good it would be, and then opened the dumbwaiter, praying it was as functional as the one back at Grays Inn Road.
He pulled up the wooden door.
The dumbwaiter was a chute that ran from the kitchens down below all the way up to the chambers up above. That meant it was akin to a pulmonary artery running from the heart of the house out to the extremities. It was a simple tray system that could be raised or lowered by ropes on a series of pulleys. The tray was either down in the kitchens, or up in the chambers above. Locke clambered into the chute awkwardly, his coat catching a nail in the wooden frame and tearing a little. He didn’t care. He grasped onto the nearest rope with his right hand and scrambled all the way into the hole and started to fall. He bit back on a scream, and instead clawed at the bare red-brick of the chute’s wall, tearing the nails out of his fingers as he slid down into the darkness below. He couldn’t stop himself. Locke kicked out desperately at the sides as he began to fall, and made a grab for the second rope. He caught it, barely, and used his feet, his back and his grip on the second rope to brace himself.
The blood rushed to his head.
Gingerly, he shifted his position in the cramped chute, bringing his legs under him. Then, with his back braced against the rough wall, he half-walked, half-climbed down the chute one lumbering foot at a time, until he reached the bottom.
The chute was sealed up.
He felt around with his hand, relying upon touch to tell him where the wall ended and the wooden panel began. He tried to work his fingers under the bottom edge and ease the door up but it had been closed off, leaving him with no alternative but to kick his way out, noise be damned.
First kick, the wood cracked.
Second kick, the wood splintered.
Third kick, the first chink of light filtered into the pitch-black darkness at the bottom of the chute.
Fourth kick, the wood surrendered and Locke’s foot tore through it, splinters shredding his ankle and calf.
Gasping, he dragged his foot clear, wincing as the jagged edge of the wooden hatch door drew blood. Leaning forward he grabbed at the pieces of door and worked them back and forth until they in turn worked free of the nails holding them. It took less than a minute to open the chute. He tossed the broken panels aside and clambered out through the hatch.
It was dark, but not absolute like it had been inside the dumbwaiter. Enough light filtered through from outside the room to give the shadows definition and pick out the contours of their contents. Not that there was much to see.
But it wasn’t what he saw that disturbed him. He had wrongly assumed the dumbwaiter would open up into the servants’ quarters, or into the kitchen itself. It didn’t. It opened up into what appeared to be an abattoir.
Meat hooks hung from the ceiling and carcasses hung on chains.
There was enough light to give lie to the fact that the room was used for storing sides of pork and beef. These carcasses had legs and hung from arms and were all too human. The room was cold, but it wasn’t that cold; the stench should have been overpowering, but it wasn’t. The entire subterranean vault was strangely odourless.
Curiosity impelled Locke to look more closely at the corpses.
Even before he saw the blank, featureless plains where their faces ought to have been, understanding had started to take shape in his mind. He counted the corpses. There were five of them, as with the featureless portraits upstairs, he realised, his mind already reaching conclusions he wasn’t prepared to accept, even as he realised these ”blanks” were dressed.
Without so much as a second thought, he looked around the room for a lantern, knowing there almost certainly had to be one, or a candle. What he found was a single gaslight waiting to be lit. It took him a moment to adjust the value, allowing the gas to flow, and another to strike a spark and throw some light over the room. The light only served to make the five faceless bodies creepier. They were dressed very much in the London fashion, but more than that, they were dressed in the same tailored Savile Row suits of his friends, down the cut and cloth. It wasn’t just that the clothes were the same, he realised a moment later, it went beyond the mere cut of the trousers, the bulk of the bodies were the same, Dorian’s suit hung on thin, almost effete shoulders, whilst McCreedy’s shirt was stretched out by a huge barrel chest. There was even one for Fabian. That hit him hard. He wanted to reach out, touch his friend’s cheek, wake him, but of course there was nothing in there to wake, no life. These things were just empty vessels.
And then, in the dim light, Locke found himself.
Everything about his faceless doppelgänger was identical down to the rough skin on its knuckles and the fine hairs on the back of its hands, even the slight declivity in the bump of his wrist bone from where he had broken it as a child and it hadn’t set properly, the replication was perfect. He was staring at himself. All that was missing was the face.
He walked around his unmoving doppelgänger three times, widdershins, studying every inch of it. It really was a perfect double.
And that was when it hit him.
One of their number was missing from this motley array, Napier.
That, coupled with the portrait, could only mean one thing: the body had found its face.
He tried to think back over the last few days, had his friend acted out of character, and if he had, when? When did it begin? For how long had they had a cuckoo in their nest?
Was it possible that the Brethren could try on these bodies at will and walk around London at liberty? Was that how they had entered the lodging house and how they had amassed such intricate knowledge of the place and then returned here to replicate it? The thought chilled Locke’s blood. How many times had he broken bread with the enemy? How many times had he shared a smoke with them?
His first instinct was to burn the bodies and put an end to their duplicity, but even as he began to root around for something flammable with which to start the fire something stayed his hand. He couldn’t do it.
He heard movement above him.
The god had no doubt sniffed out his disappearance and was coming down to usher his soul onto the other side.
Locke made the sign of the cross and left the faceless bodies—the Ka’s because that is what they were, he knew. Like everything the Brethren meddled with, the faceless ones were steeped in ancient Egyptian mysticism—and went in search of a way out of his own private hell.
Only this wasn’t his hell. His hell was one of the rooms further along the dank basement corridor: a hall of mirrors. It took him a moment to grasp the hellish ingenuity of it, but even as he reached out with his mind, trying to connect with the base matter of the universe he felt his thoughts being reflected back at him, distorted. He backed out of the room. Door by door he checked the cells off the corridor: the entire servants’ quarters had been converted into a torture chamber for the Gentleman Knights of London. One room appeared to be lined with silver, making it the perfect cage for McCreedy, a room where he couldn’t release his Anafanta. Another had been converted into a padded cell, which could have housed any of them, but the bluish blush of the gaslight betrayed the glyphs stitched into the walls. He recognised several of them from the papers he had found in the Reading Room, meaning they were connected with the soul. This cell had been designed to hold Dorian, the necromancer. And then he found Napier’s pit. The room was dark and dank, with manacles shackled to the wall. Napier’s body was in the pit. He knew it was Napier’s body even with its half-eaten face and stripped down bones.
There were still rats down in the hole, crawling over his friend, though they no longer seemed to be feeding.
/> The pit was the one environment where light could be controlled. It was a simple trap, but effective, negating Napier’s gift. There was no way he could fade. And now he was dead.
Meaning that thing out there, that thing wearing his face, was a monster.
And it had their trust.
Locke had to find the others.
He had to warn them.
And then he had to kill the cuckoo.
But first things first, he had to escape from the Sanctuary.
In the bottom of Napier’s pit there was a grate which no doubt led out to the sewers, but that meant climbing into the rats and crawling blind through the shit and the swill of London. Their chittering made his skin crawl. He really didn’t want to go down into that hole, but compared with Anubis, or whatever that thing really was, a few rats was a walk in the park.
He listened to the groaning boards of the floor above, picturing the jackal-headed god prowling relentless back and forth in front of the Smoking Room door. The realization that the creature lacked even the limited omnipotence to sense that its quarry had fled gave the man renewed confidence. This thing, whatever it was, was no god. More likely than not it was another Ka, somehow fashioned into the likeness of the Death God. That meant that he had a chance. He wasn’t pitting himself against some all-seeing, all-knowing immortal, he was going up against a shell. Whatever was inside the shell, the odds were it wasn’t Anubis. He could live with those odds.
He wasn’t done here, he knew. He would have to return. He couldn’t leave the Ka’s there just waiting to replace them, neither could he leave a jackal-headed ”god” to prowl, nor could he leave his friend’s bones to rot. But a sudden tremor that shivered through the basement rooms reminded him all too physically that time had not stood still whilst he was down here. Father London still needed to be stopped, and he could only pray he had found something that would help them. Subconsciously, his hand went for the papers, needing the reassurance touching them offered.
London Macabre Page 31
