London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

  ”What are you doing here?” she gasped, choking out the question. She couldn’t see the ice-woman. She couldn’t see anything for the water spilling down between her fingers. She felt the bond between them weakening. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. But it didn’t need to. She already knew the answer. It was in inside her, buried away with the rest of the shared memories. And as she touched them, Emily felt pity surge up inside her despite all that the woman had subjected her to and the threat she posed. She wanted to tell thing it was too late, no matter how fierce this love of hers was, it couldn’t defy death. If this thing, this residue within her head, really was her queen—and given all of the impossible things that had happened to her since the lions awoke she had no reason to doubt her own mind, it was her, or some twisted aspect of her—her husband had died more than two decades earlier.

  Inside that burning core of rage she touched something else.

  Sadness.

  Melancholic inevitability.

  The woman already knew that. She had known that the moment she entered this London. How could she not after a lifetime of scouring infinite worlds looking for her husband and failing again and again?

  All of these images of the man dying in her arms assailed Emily and for a moment she couldn’t separate herself from the Ice Queen’s memories. The agony of loss cut sharply, all the more so for the refusal of hope to die. And that, she realised, was what drove this entity … hope.

  That was what Father London was to her.

  Hope.

  She didn’t understand it at all, how this giant iron man could mean so much to her, how it could bring her dead love back, but that was what the queen believed.

  ”He … isn’t … here …” Emily managed, forcing the words out between clenched teeth.

  The Ice Queen turned to look at her then, slowly and with crusted grace. The scorn on her frosted face withered Emily where she lay but she didn’t look away.

  ”Do you think I am simple, child?” the Ice Queen asked. ”I know he isn’t here. I’ve known it from the moment I entered this godforsaken place. You cannot love as we love and not know.”

  ”Then … why?”

  The Ice Queen did not answer. She didn’t need to, Emily could hear the answer resonating inside her own head as the residual ice whispered, ”Because he is there, somewhere, and I will bring him back to me.” She believed it completely and utterly. She believed it so much so she was willing to tear worlds apart to make it so. But for all that belief she was no fool. She did not trust anyone. Emily caught snatches of memories of conversations with spiritualists, séances, promises made and promises broken over guttering candles across tables marked with pentacles and mystical carvings. Alone they meant nothing, but together their message was overwhelming. The Ice Queen had sought out every magicker and charlatan, every witch doctor, alchemist and warlock, every herbalist, soothsayer and fakir, and through them she had found hope and fixated on it. It didn’t matter that their so-called forces were beyond her ken. She was prepared to make pacts with every god, daemon, devil and angel to get her lover back. The image of the horned god burned in her mind: shaggy, goat-haired legs, cloven hooves and horns. And that smile … lascivious … sexual. The image sent a thrill through Emily’s body all the way to her fingertips, and as though in answer, the ground shivered.

  And then, brighter than day, the worlds inside her head erupted in flame.

  It began with the sky, flames tearing out from the horizon and raging over her head as it burned, then the ground beneath her feet and the surface of the river ignited.

  She rolled on the ground, beating at her chest and legs, unable to differentiate between the vision and reality. She felt her skin blister beneath her hands and screamed and screamed until her voice broke. She lay there gasping, unable to grasp what had just happened or how she had just survived it.

  ”What did you do?” Emily asked, trying to unravel the thousands of memories before they could fade completely, but it was a fool’s errand.

  It wasn’t just one world that had burned, she realised sickly, looking up at Father London’s huge iron legs. From this angle the Golem seemed to disappear into the clouds. This thing—the words Soul Golem came to her, they weren’t hers—was a walker of worlds, but more than that, it was a destroyer of worlds.

  And she controlled it.

  But Emily didn’t know how. She couldn’t remember.

  ”We will purge this place and move on,” the Ice Queen told her. ”Just as we have before. There is nothing here worth saving.”

  ”No,” Emily gasped, not through shock, but rather the sudden surge of pain that twisted beneath her skull. She clawed at her temples, spittle frothing at her lips as it went from mere pain to black, blinding agony. She felt her skin physically blistering beneath the battering of the heat despite the fact the fires were in her mind.

  It was all she could do to roll over.

  And again.

  The Ice Queen’s laughter mocked her.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Mason didn’t think.

  There wasn’t time.

  He didn’t know what was happening to the girl, but he could see the rash of blisters spreading across her skin and all he could think to do was grab her and throw her into the river and hope that she could come back to her senses in time to swim.

  ”Stupid girl,” he muttered, ”What have you done?” But in truth he didn’t want to know. He grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her across the ground toward the water’s edge.

  The Ice Queen’s laughter haunted him, but he ignored it. Once the girl was in the water he would cleave the damned thing’s head from its shoulders and be damned. It wasn’t Napier under there so it didn’t matter.

  ”Forgive me,” he said to the girl, and bundled her over the side into the water, praying the shock of it would bring her back to her senses.

  The Thames splashed high, breaking its banks, as Father London’s ponderous feet came down again.

  And Emily went under.

  Mason couldn’t bear to watch.

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  She hit the water.

  The shock of it brought her screaming to her senses, immediately dousing the fire inside her. She kicked and splashed at the water, scrambling for the surface. Emily bobbed up to the top, spitting filthy water. Somewhere, too close, a coal barge sounded its horn. She twisted, trying to see where it was, when she saw the face of Big Ben in the distance. The huge hands of the clock juddered around another minute.

  The clock.

  There was something important about the clock.

  The bell?

  No.

  The clock itself.

  It was there, inside her, but it was fading fast.

  The face.

  In gilt letters on each of the clock’s four faces.

  Four faces, for the cardinals: north, south, east and west. Four faces for the elements, earth, air, fire and water.

  Emily slipped beneath the waves as Father London kicked up another surge. She fought her way back to the surface. Her skirts weighed heavily on her, threatening to drag her down again even as she kicked out with her feet.

  The words Domine Salvam Fac Reginam Nostram Victoriam Primam were set into the faces; Oh Lord, keep safe our Queen Victoria. They weren’t merely an imprecation, she realised, swallowing another mouthful of the river, they were an incantation. Even as the conduit broke once and for all, she realised they were more than that, they were the spell of the city.

  Emily said them aloud, and even as she finished the final word felt the air thicken and be harsher on her lungs as she breathed it in. She felt the wind rush up against her face, agitating the water all around her into a froth of spume and lather. She heard a bell toll. It was echoed all across the city a fraction later, the sound rolling over the soot-stained roofs and chimneys. And the soot began to stir, agitated by the sound, to form tiny soot-devils. In the air itself the coal dust that formed the thick, impenetrable smog
the city had become so renowned for began to agglomerate, thickening into a darker smear in the sky. It was as though Father London had begun to cast a second shadow.

  Emily repeated the words, knowing instinctively that she needed to repeat the incantation four times, once for each of the faces, once for each of the elements. The bells of London rang out again, chiming as the last syllable of the invocation, the lingering em of Primam left her lips.

  There were other sounds hiding beneath the bells this time, voices, layered one upon another to converge in a haunting undercurrent of cries and whispers. She had heard these voices before. These were the voices of the city’s shades, the dear and near departed. The dead of the Great Fire, the dead of the Plague, the dead of so many other small tragedies. They had found their voices. And those voices urged the dust to rise and the second shadow to thicken.

  Emily trod water while the river surged around her. More than once the undertow threatened to drag her under but she kicked out against it and kept her head up. She spat out another mouthful of river water.

  The shadow was thicker now, but lacked the form of Father London. It was diffuse and blurred around more than just the edges. It seemed as though there were huge gaps—wounds—within it where the coal dust had yet to gather. Even so, it lacked the definition of a genuinely human form and seemed more like a giant dust cloud.

  But as she started thinking like that, imagining arms and legs and huge clubbing fists, the fragments of coal, a core element of the earth itself, seemed to eddy and swirl in the rising wind, breaking away from the main bulk of the shadow to form the beginnings of crude limbs.

  The four winds howled.

  All along the surface of the river the particles of coal dust that had settled and submerged responded to the invocation, rising up through the black water to push and strain against the surface—and for a moment her memories, her fears, had them coalescing into fingers and arms pushing up to breach the surface, and into heads and shoulders as she shaped them into the very same ghosts she had seen throw themselves into the river. That memory was hers, she realised, as wrong as it was, it was all Emily Sheridan, and it opened up a part of her mind that she hadn’t realised she had closed. And more memories came flooding back, the bitter pain of London’s ghosts, the desperation that had their residual energies hurling themselves from the embankment for eternity upon eternity hopelessly, and the fear that she had somehow slipped out of this life into some limbo where the dead did walk, and did own voices, and did still suffer. The memory of standing on the embankment, arms outstretched turning and turning in circles while the ghosts fled past her from a city they still believed was on fire… . Who was she?

  And then, the deeper doubt she had wrestled with all of her adult life: was she mad?

  More memories opened up to her, of sterile wards in the sanatorium, of nurses mocking her and of morphine being pumped into her body to silence her night after night.

  In the air, the coal-dust shadow creature took on more and more human traits as Emily’s mind wrestled with the memories of the sanatorium and the abuse and the morphine and opiates that had addled her brain and left her deranged, not only seeing but talking to the dead of London’s past.

  That is where she had come from that night, she remembered. She had escaped the sanatorium. They had forgotten to buckle the restraints and she had played docile, pretending to be drugged. They were sloppy with the locks on certain cell doors because they liked to come back after lights out and take advantage of the docile women. They pretended to be the daemons the girls were petrified of, playing into their psychosis. It was a bastard’s trick, but with no one to police them they were free to do whatever they pleased to the unfortunates. No one left Bedlam, even the so-called curables left a part of themselves behind. They could move the building anywhere they wanted, be it Bishopsgate, Moorfields or Southwark, but the lunatics of the Bethlem Royal Hospital remained the same, as did the ”Show of Bethlehem” on the first Tuesday of the month, every month. For a penny the good people of the city could come and poke sticks at the ”patients,” mock, jeer and satisfy their voyeuristic tendencies as the inmates fought and fucked each other for their amusement.

  It had been one of ”those” nights; hence her cell had been left open and unguarded.

  When lights out had come, when her inmates were raving and banging their heads off the walls and wailing and bargaining with whatever gods, devils or daemons shared their cells, she had slipped through the dark corridors, up the stairs from the subterranean hell she shared with the others, and run out into the night city.

  Someone had followed her. For a while as she crossed the river from Southwark into the city proper, she had thought it was one of her fellow patients making an opportunist break-for-it in the chaos of her own flight. Even now she could hear the slap of footsteps on the cobbled street and the man’s heavy breathing behind her, driving her on. He wasn’t one of the wardens, neither was he one of the ”nurses.” She had felt his presence in the shadows, felt his hunger and knew beyond any shadow of doubt that he wanted to do her harm, but before he could she had found the lions and brought them to life… .

  Brought the lions to life … and now here she was, half-drowned, summoning an elemental spirit out of the soot of the industrial smog with an invocation hidden in plain sight … and she wasn’t insane?

  And for just a moment Father London’s coal-dust shadow wore the face of a Bedlamite, the voices of the dead hidden within the wind so hideous, so great, they could have driven a sane woman out of her wits.

  ”What are you doing?” the Ice Queen’s shriek split the night, and all of those bodiless voices took up her cry, but Emily refused to be silenced. She wasn’t insane. She wasn’t insane. She wasn’t insane. She repeated it over and over inside her mind like a mantra, or Hail Mary, full of grace.

  ”Domine Salvam Fac Reginam Nostram Victoriam Primam,” she repeated, and the wind intensified becoming a gale. The winds tore at everything, every brick, every stone, every slate, every tile, every tree and lamp post, every cab and buggy along the roadside, and, even as it whipped up a storm, the wind shook every window in its frame and bullied the frightened Londoners along the crowded streets.

  And through it all, through the coal dust tearing free of the confines of her memory and madness, Emily Sheridan was the calm in the heart of the storm.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Mason staggered back a step then another as the gale force winds battered him toward the embankment. It took every stubborn ounce of will he possessed not to give more ground. The wind tore at his hair and soaked clothes, but mercifully lacked that last bit of ferocity to hurl him from his feet into the Thames.

  The Ice Queen encrusting her newly stolen body shrieked out her impotent rage.

  Mason put his head down and battled the wind, gaining a single step before it pushed him back two more.

  The wind tore the useless Distillator out of his hand and sent it skittering across the ground and over the edge into the water. He watched it go over the embankment and disappear beneath the spume, lost, then looked beyond the water’s edge to the gathering vortex-whirl of coal dust as it coalesced still further, gathering shape and form to become a giant black shadow man standing in the path of Father London. It was like nothing the chamberlain had ever seen.

  And the black dust wasn’t merely gathering in the air; it came from everywhere, rising up from every rooftop and out of the smoke belching from every chimney, but it also peeled away from the façade of every house and hospice and from the red-brick of every factory and workhouse to gyre like a swarm of ghosts down the streets and across the rooftops. It stung his skin where it hit him but it didn’t stay to dirty his skin, the forces compelling it to move drove every last granule toward the shadow man until it was every bit as substantial and terrifying as Father London itself.

  Down in the water, he saw the girl battling against the tidal surge, spitting out mouthfuls of water and splashing frantically to
keep herself afloat. She was fighting to speak, but the water kept rushing up to fill her mouth and silence her. She went under, only to surface seconds later, crying: ”Domine Salvam Fac Reginam Nostram Victoriam Primam,” It was an invocation, he knew. He could feel the power of the words, could feel them channelling The Art. It was obvious the girl was using The Art to stir the coal dust and raise the elemental. She had to be allowed to finish her conjuration if they were going to stand a chance against the damned iron Golem.

  And then that he noticed the frost creeping across the water, crystallizing it even as she went under a second time in a few seconds.

  The Ice Queen wasn’t done.

  The girl was in the water, at her mercy.

  Water, ice, ice, water.

  He had to help her.

  But the first thing he had to do was turn his back on Emily.

  It was the hardest thing he had done all night because it felt like he was abandoning her. He had to force himself to rationalise the act. He wasn’t turning his back on her, he was doing the only thing he could to help her. Mason gripped the sword, Mercy, all the more fiercely and with both hands now and battled the wind, step by precious step, to confront the Ice Queen. He was plagued by doubt, by the duality of the meaning behind the Confessor’s naming of the blade, and in truth what mercy was: a city at the mercy of the tyrannical Ice Queen, a girl in the water at the mercy of the ice, the ice with the power to kill or spare, was that mercy? Or was it merciful for him to show compassion where none was due? Worse, would it damn them?

  ”Enough!” he bellowed, but the mad queen merely cackled, the icy frost spilling out her mouth and down through every splash and spill of water to the river itself where it had already begun to freeze.