London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

  He became life.

  And he became death itself.

  Unholy, Dirty and Beautiful

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Locke stared at the sigil, there, engraved into the iron of the monstrous head, mocking him, and at his bare hands. The stupidity of having nothing, no weapon or tool, with which to strike out the sigil hit him. He’d been so focussed on the first part of the problem, getting through the barrier, he hadn’t thought about what he was going to do now. It wasn’t as though he could scratch through the sigil with his fingernails. He cast about, looking for something, anything, that he could use to set about the soul trap.

  But the inside of the Golem was bare.

  He cursed his stupidity, but the word just wasn’t there. All that remained was that low, painful note that reverberated inside the iron head. The echoing thrum lasted long after he finished speaking. He felt it deep in his bones. And then he felt those ghostly hands again. He didn’t dare look at his skin, he understood the simple truth: he didn’t have the luxury of time. He had to destroy the sigil and pray, somehow, that doing so fixed him.

  He knew it wouldn’t.

  There were no miracle fixes.

  Lying to himself was not something Brannigan Locke was particularly good at.

  All he could hope to do was break the sigil before whatever was going to happen to him happened.

  And he was hardly helpless.

  He placed his hand flat on the soul trap, and felt nothing. For a moment he felt doubt. Could he channel The Art through the barrier, or was he cut off from it? Was he suddenly ordinary? And if he was, how could he possibly destroy the soul trap?

  Locke dragged his nails over the rusty surface. Flakes of oxidised metal fell away, but the sigil was scored in too deeply for a few loose flakes of rust to make any difference to its integrity.

  He turned his attention to the strips of weld joining the closest girders, hoping that there might be some sort of weakness he could exploit, but even as he started picking at the weld he was overwhelmed by the futility of it. Even if he picked through every ounce of weld until his fingers were bloody, he wouldn’t be able to lift the girder, and certainly not wield it with the accuracy it would need to break the soul trap.

  Again he stared at his bare hands. The skin across the backs of both had begun to blister and swell. One of the blisters ruptured while he watched, a yellowish pus weeping out of the sore. For a moment he almost believed that the pus might somehow erode the iron, but there was nothing acidic about it. No bite. No burn. It was just his body dying.

  He didn’t know how long he had left. He could feel himself weakening, nausea creeping up inside him. He could taste iron at the back of his throat. Blood. He was in trouble here.

  It was all or nothing.

  He closed his eyes and pressed his hand flat against the soul trap. ”Break it or be damned,” he said, feeding the Golem’s echo chamber with another insufferable bass thrum of sound. But instead of wincing and buckling beneath the pain, he focussed on it and used that sudden flare-up to harness the energy all around him, deep in the sound, deep in his bones, deep in the iron, and transform it into the chilling touch that would weaken the iron, turning it brittle. He felt the cold stream out of his fingertips, but it was an illusion. The molecular structure of the iron was slowing and slowing to the point that the cold was echoing back from the metal. The freezing iron brought the chill to his touch, the cold did not emanate from it. It was blessed relief from the heat radiating through every nerve and fibre of his being. But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the sigil grew colder and colder, ribbons of frost crackling across it as its core temperature sank quickly toward absolute zero.

  The truth of the matter was that even so cold, the comfort it gave outweighed the pain, and that truth was damning. Brannigan Locke’s body was cooking itself from the inside out.

  Locke withdrew his hand, made a fist and hammered a punch right into the centre of the sigil. He delivered the blow with such force he felt the bones in his hand shatter even as the metal beneath it exploded into fragments. The blow rang out, transforming the hollow insides of Father London into a deep, sonorous bell.

  And this time all of the sounds folded in upon themselves, echoed and amplified by the weird acoustics of the Golem.

  The sound rose and rose, spiralling beyond hearing and existing only within the vibrations in his bones and in the eddies in his blood. The chime wasn’t finished; it resonated through the entire metal superstructure of the construct, turning the entire frame into a vast echo chamber, and even as the sound moved into the supersonic spectrum within the head, it grew louder and louder as it was taken up in the torso and belly and finally down in the feet, as it claimed more of the iron body to feed its hunger, meaning that it was never truly silent.

  And then the cycle began again, the tone swelling to wash back into the Golem’s head as it faded within Father London’s feet.

  Locke stood in the middle of it, battered on all sides by wave upon wave of sound.

  His knees buckled beneath the bombardment of noise. He felt the soft, sticky wetness of blood seep out of his ears as the tympanic membrane ruptured. Locke fell to his knees, clutching at the sides of his head.

  It wasn’t just Locke that collapsed beneath the battery of sound.

  The vibrations tore at the Golem’s metal frame, twisting against the welds that held it together. One of the girders tore free of its anchor-point, buckling and spinning as it fell, crashing no more than a few feet from where Locke knelt.

  Locke didn’t hear it.

  He couldn’t hear anything beyond the blood pumping through his head.

  Locke dropped his head, doubling over in pain as fresh waves of agony battered his body. It skewered up through him from his scrotum to the base of his skull, twisting through nerve endings as mercilessly as it tore at the roots of his hair and teeth and swelled through the marrow in his bones. The blinding pain drove his head down further, until his forehead pressed up against the thrumming iron of the floor the Golem’s cheek made beneath him. Above him one of the huge iron plates that made up Father London’s patella tore free of the others with a wrenching scream and came spinning down. It hammered into Locke’s back. The sheer weight of it drove him down, but the damage was already done. Something broke inside him. He felt it. He felt the sledgehammer blow of the iron plate as it slammed into the arch of his spine, driving him down flat to the floor; the searing pain as the edge of the huge plate cut deep, lacerating the musculature of his of back and biting through the dorsal root and thoracic nerves, cutting through the vertebral disc, and then, that single, sharp, bowstring snap of his spinal cord severing.

  It was the last thing he ever felt.

  His last coherent thought was of Dorian. He would never know if he had done enough to save his friend’s soul. The rest was pain and death.

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  A sudden flurry of movement caught in the corner of Cain’s eye.

  Sataniel had finished playing with the lion and was strutting around it, demanding fealty. Cain turned away, looking for the source of the distraction. He breathed in deeply, nostrils flaring. He couldn’t smell anything—or rather all he could smell was the putrid reek of the dead Sataniel had dragged out of their graves. It overpowered every other smell in the whole damned city.

  There it was again.

  He twisted, quicker this time, and could have sworn he caught the briefest glimpse of a huge red wolf walking on its hind legs as it disappeared into the packed crowd milling dead.

  But outside of fairy tales a wolf had no place walking upright like a man.

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  The rats fed on the remains beside McCreedy’s wolf, stripping it down to bone and gristle.

  He had no sense of the world about him.

  It did not exist beyond the end of his snout.

  His tongue lolled against slack jaws.

  His ribcage heaved in time with his pan
ting.

  He.

  It.

  It.

  He.

  McCreedy’s sense of self was struggling to be heard, to take shape within the primal instincts of the wolf-brain. But it was hard. He could barely sense himself in there. He scented Hathor’s blood, and with it, the sophisticated thought processes of his brain were subsumed by base instinct and the hunger of the wolf. Every time the man that was McCreedy began to fight toward the surface the animal forced him back down.

  He had never struggled with the reversion before. The two of them, the wolf and the man, co-existed. There was respect between them. They shared this body, the beast within and the man without, they didn’t war for control of it. But suddenly the beast was stronger, dominant, and the Anafanta refused to be harnessed.

  It was unnatural.

  The few moments, between the moments of blinding pain, that McCreedy was himself, he knew that something more than just his animalistic self was holding him down, and in those moments of lucidity he knew the Brethren were responsible. He just didn’t know how.

  He lay there in the dirt, plagued by the unremitting agony of transformation—or failed transformation. He writhed and twisted, desperate inhuman howls escaping his slack jowls as every nerve and fibre of his body cried out against the wrongness of being trapped in its wolf-form. The lupine muscles and tendons contracted against the bones as the marrow part-mutated and McCreedy tried to rein the beast in, but even as his snout began to break and reform as a chin and pugilist’s brow something stopped it, and the pain of that something was beyond excruciating. He felt as though both aspects of his body were being stretched on the rack to the point of snapping.

  And then, suddenly, the pain disappeared.

  Nothing had changed that he was aware of, but suddenly he was aware, and that was a miracle all of its own making. McCreedy clawed at the ground, dragging himself away from where Mason, Napier, and the Ice Queen were duking it out toe to toe. Mason brandished a broken sword as though it were Excalibur itself. McCreedy heard the girl splashing and shouting in the water, her voice spiralling as she found the words to conjure life from the dust itself and set it upon the great Golem that had torn its way through from the other side, the water roiling around her, and the screams of the Brethren as the rats pushed them back and back toward the walls. There was no escaping them. Ravens cawed and squawked, their wingbeats like drums. He was assailed by so many smells, each and every one of them more overpowering than the last. There was so much blood in the air, not just from Hathor and the rats, either. It was everywhere, carried on the breeze along with the unmistakable odour of fear.

  Everything was so much more alive to him, heightened.

  And there was that other smell, the one that had plagued him for so long: the thing that was not Napier but looked like Napier and sounded like him, too. Napier and the chamberlain faced off. They were talking, Napier mocking Mason. Napier stank of meat, like a carcass strung up in a butcher’s shop, but not like meat as in the coat of meat worn by a man, and most certainly not McCreedy’s friend. It wasn’t just the mask the ice threw over his scent, either, though that dulled most human scents like sweat and the dribble of urine and the tobacco that lingered on the tongue, it went deeper than that. McCreedy could only watch as the ice took shape, crusting over Napier’s shoulders and back and creeping up his neck and into his hairline, and heard the shift in the man’s tone as the Ice Queen took control of the vessel. Despite the ice, everything about Eugene Napier was wrong. He didn’t smell like the man he had followed to the Sanctuary door. And there could only be one reason for that: he wasn’t.

  McCreedy drew his legs in beneath him, fighting the agony of transformation. He howled at the earth, his forehead pressed flat against the soaking stones, and, as the storm of sounds raged, he heard another altogether more wretched and brutal roar, and raised his head in time to see Mason’s savage blow cleave through Napier’s neck. It took too many swings to cut the dead man’s head from his shoulders.

  It bounced on to the ground and rolled away toward the water’s edge.

  A moment later the broken blade fell from Mason’s fingers and clattered to the ground. McCreedy saw the ribbon of ice arc out from the headless corpse to hit the chamberlain square in the chest and then encrust his torso, spreading like the blue blush of death to his throat.

  Half-man, half-wolf, McCreedy rose and stumbled toward the fallen sword.

  As he reached down to grasp it, aware that the transformation had faltered and he was neither one thing nor the other, but with the wolf’s sensitivity, McCreedy felt the prickle of an unearthly presence at the nape of his neck, and heard the whispered word, ”Follow.”

  He would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that it was Fabian Stark’s voice, and as the great bronze lion bounded off, racing along the riverside, McCreedy didn’t for a minute doubt that Stark had meant for him to give chase. He looked once at Mason wrestling with the ice as it claimed him. There was nothing he could do to stop it.

  Instead, he stooped down to retrieve Mercy and started to run.

  Half-wolf, he was faster by far than he would have been in his fully human form, but even so he was no match for the lion’s ground-devouring gait. The great beast raced away from him. McCreedy wasn’t worried; he had the beast’s scent. It was utterly unique in its metallic nature. Equally, this trans-human McCreedy’s stamina was far beyond that of any normal man. He could run and run and run. He raced through the streets of London, huge powerful legs eating the miles in a long, loping stride even as his clawed feet scrabbled on the cobbles.

  He caught glimpses of himself in the windows he ran passed, and he was monstrous. His face was caught halfway between human and animal, still beneath a thick coat of hair, his shoulders broad, chest and arms almost human, while his legs, like his face, were thick with fur and muscular—and equally, those muscles were longer and tauter than any man’s had a right to be—but in those fleeting glimpses he looked almost human.

  It was a trick of the light.

  The most human thing about him was his mind, and even that struggled with the conflicting urges of man and beast as the more animalistic urges fought for supremacy within him. His hair streamed out behind him, McCreedy gritted his teeth and ran on. The exhilaration of the chase fired his heart. The sword, Mercy, felt weightless in his hand, like an extension of his mutated body.

  He smelled the danse macabre before he saw it; the cloying, choking reek of corruption, the fester of decay, the mouldering of the dank earth, all of those smells coming together to perfume the streets with the many unmistakable fragrances of death.

  McCreedy slowed down.

  There was danger here, and not just from the dead.

  There was another scent, older and infinitely more corrupt.

  His nostrils flared as it wormed its way into him.

  He walked the final hundred yards to the street corner and turned it in time to witness the beautiful man slay the lion. There were so many stenches that assailed him all at once, and despite the rank perfume of the corpses, one scent was tantalizingly familiar. He had followed it before. In that moment, as Sataniel’s beauty slipped and mask after vile mask replaced it, McCreedy felt a wave of utter and abject helplessness unlike anything he had ever known hit him. Before him, mocking them all, the goat god, the fallen angel, the adversary, the evil with a thousand faces, reached into the miraculous lion and snuffed out its life as though it were no more magical than a mayfly or a gnat. The lion shuddered once and whatever brought it to life died. The sheer, unremitting hopelessness that hit him in that instant drove Haddon McCreedy down to his knees. He opened his mouth to cry out, but what escaped his lips was less than a mournful howl. It was a pitiful mewling. The sword began to slip from his grasp, ’its broken tip dipping toward the cobbles.

  No one paid the half-wolf a blind bit of notice as he knelt there.

  Why would they? The entire street was filled with a carnival of corpses. He was nothing m
ore than another aspect of the freak show that trailed in the devil’s wake. Against such a backdrop, of decomposing bodies and old bones shuffling along, he was utterly unremarkable, even with his thick fur and elongated limbs.

  That was when he noticed the vampires staring intently at him.

  They didn’t move to betray him, but neither did they move to help him.

  He didn’t know why, split loyalties, some sort of debt or honour or indifference. Perhaps his presence was simply irrelevant to their motivations?

  But as he breathed in the death all around him, he knew why they didn’t move.

  They had chosen their side in the fight and aligned themselves with the danse macabre.

  But that didn’t explain why they didn’t betray him.

  McCreedy struggled to stand, not wanting to risk exposure any more than he had to, then started to run, only managing four or five steps before his legs tied themselves in knots and buckled beneath him. He almost fell, the sword dangling in his hand, but managed to lurch on a few more steps, putting the dead between him and the lion. Two things happened near simultaneously. One, he saw the man again, the one who had slain the angel on the steps of Whitechapel. That explained the familiar scent. They locked eyes, but McCreedy’s unsteady legs took him behind a hunchbacked corpse before the flicker of recognition could light in Cain’s eyes. He had no way of knowing whether the homunculus would remember him or not, but it wasn’t a risk worth taking. The other happening was far more spectacular: the horrific glory of the Morning Star’s radiance touched the closest of the onlookers. As it did, the moonlight and shadows shrank away from them and their faces lit up. The glorious light burned white hot, so brilliant nothing as fragile as skin could resist its touch for more than a few seconds. The onlookers began to smoulder, wisps of black smoke curling away from their bodies a single breath before they caught light. From that first spark until the all-consuming fire burned out, McCreedy managed to swallow five frightened breaths. By the time he took the sixth breath all that remained of thirteen unfortunate souls was ash on the ground where they had stood.