London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

  He moved as quickly as he dared, stalking around the periphery of the crowd.

  Stark had urged him to follow the lion, he was sure of it, and just as sure that there had been a purpose to it beyond watching the devil claim his due, but what?

  What could he do against the dancing dead?

  He couldn’t face them all.

  He couldn’t turn the vampires.

  He had seen Cain murder the angel. There was no way he could kill the Devil’s right hand. Not without a miracle.

  But then, perhaps this half-life he found himself trapped in was just that, a miracle? He was faster than any man had a right to be, he knew that, and his stamina was equally inhuman. But more than that, he wasn’t dependent upon tooth and claw to wage war. He had his wits, his ruthlessness and his cunning, all of the most basic human traits. Haddon McCreedy might have been neither one thing nor the other, but perhaps he was the best of both? He was a survivor and he would fight tooth, claw, nail or broken sword, to stay that way.

  McCreedy worked his way around the edge of the crowd, moving clockwise.

  He caught occasional glimpses of Cain likewise moving around the edge of the crowd, keeping himself always diametrically opposite to the prowling McCreedy.

  They completed three full circuits, watching each other every step of the way.

  There was no point pretending Cain hadn’t seen the man-wolf now. None whatsoever. They were locked in a slow, taunting dance, Cain trying to goad him into rushing across the wide square, McCreedy well aware that to do so would be suicide.

  He had to trust Stark, and in doing so trust he wasn’t losing the precious little that remained of his mind.

  He prowled another complete circuit of the dead crowd, fighting down the nausea he felt at their rotting carcasses.

  The broken sword sang to him.

  Mercy.

  But there could be no mercy for a beast like Cain, the first murderer, the angel killer. He had seen the carnage wrought by Cain’s own sword, the bloody stumps where the angel’s wings had been hacked off. He couldn’t unsee it. The world didn’t work like that. The dead angel would never leave him. Cain was wickedness incarnate. The only mercy would be to put him down. And that was a mercy for the world, not the daemon.

  McCreedy rolled his wrist, turning the sword through a series of quick cuts to carve a figure eight out of the air. Despite its broken tip the blade’s balance was impeccable. It felt so right in his hand, like an extension of his body. The big man was more of a claymore wielder by choice but there was no denying that Mercy felt right for him. He didn’t believe in fate, the guiding hand of chance, McCreedy was a Darwinist. He believed in the evolution of the species, and more importantly the evolution of the social organism. Fate was a fool’s crutch, as was faith in some sort of divine force shaping the universe. For all that a dead angel still lay in the Smoking Room of their lodging house, the big man couldn’t bring himself to believe that God, whatever He may be, had a divine, ineffable plan for all of them. He didn’t go to church, he didn’t pray, and yet it was down to him to face Cain, the biblical fratricide. It was him who had glimpsed the impossible Garden through the Ald Gate. And it was him who believed a dead man had led him here, to this grand grotesque parade where the devil had just put down a living bronze statue. By rights everything he believed in ought to have been turned upside down by these ”truths’,” but fundamentally it all came down to the same thing: he needed to believe there was a chance he had control over his own life. Anything else was unthinkable. If he had to cut down the devil in his tracks to prove his own freedom, so be it. McCreedy didn’t close the final loop, he flicked his wrist to draw the blade back, leaving the figure eight open, so in truth he carved infinity out of the air. It was a petty rebellion, but he needed to do it for himself. God closed loops, but McCreedy could leave them open if he wanted to.

  Across the street Cain saw him and dipped his head, letting the man-wolf know the time for dancing was at an end.

  Now it was time to fight.

  McCreedy broke from the cover of the corpses, stepping into the circle. Ash crunched beneath his bare feet as he walked through one of the unfortunates who had sampled the full, glorious light of the Morning Star. Cain matched him step for step, but before either of them could meet in the middle everything changed.

  Sataniel’s mocking changed into a soul-searing shriek.

  McCreedy turned away from Cain, just as Cain turned away from McCreedy, and even as he did so, the homunculus stiffened and clamped both hands across his ears. It took a fraction of a second longer for McCreedy to hear it: it was the sound of all hell being torn out of a single body, brutally. In that fraction of a second McCreedy saw something, a flicker of light, a ghost, pass from the lion into the devil’s bare chest and then the devil threw his arms wide, as though mocking the crucifixion, only his entire body convulsed brutally as though wracked by some huge electrical current. Sataniel tossed his head back, mouth stretched impossibly wide as his scream refused to end.

  And as he screamed and shook the light inside him intensified, burning brighter and brighter and brighter until it was blinding and even the devil’s skin couldn’t contain it.

  McCreedy had to look away.

  The God Particle VI

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Stark was the light of life.

  The beacon.

  Hope.

  He was undying, pure. He existed in everything and in nothing. And as the light he burned brightest within Sataniel, son of the morning. He existed in all of the fallen angels, in songs their blood sang. He existed inside the veils separating the Prime Material from the oblique worlds, holding back the clash of cultures and structures because without those veils more than just worlds would collide.

  But he could not allow the fallen to walk this world or any other linked to it, no matter weakly.

  So he allowed himself to burn, focussing his residual energy, his last ghostly presence in this place, upon Sataniel, and slipped into his body every bit as easily as the devil had forced his hand into the bronze lion to snuff out his life. The last of the players were in place, he had done what he could for his friends. All that remained was to put out the brightest star, and to do that, rather than trying to douse its light, he fed it. He fed it more and more, pouring the energy of all things into it, pouring himself into it and using every one of the elements at his disposal to fuel the light of the Morning Star until it burned out.

  He fed the light with the fire of the earth’s core, he fed it with the endless kinetic energy of the wind and the water, he fed it with radiation of the sun’s rays and for one truly glorious moment Sataniel outshone every star in the galaxy, burning brighter in that moment than the sun could over its entire life, but it could not last.

  And still, even when the immortal vessel could take no more, Fabian Stark poured The Art itself into the Fallen One, channelling everything that was magical about the world into that one place, that one fixed moment in time, drawing the very stuff of life from the trees and grass, from the weeds clogging the cobbles and the moss limning the gutters, from every living organism inside the city limits, and, unable to contain it, the light of the Morning Star tore out of Sataniel. Bright beams burst out of his mouth, drowning the scream, out of his eyes, searing the sky as they lanced up into the black night and transformed it to day, and out of every pore in his flesh, blazing brighter and brighter, blinding the eyes of everyone close enough to see, but it wasn’t enough. His hands blistered and those blisters ruptured, spewing light, and beneath the blisters the soft flesh blistered again, and burst and blistered and burst as more and more of God’s light tore out of him.

  That’s what it was, Stark knew. It was the stuff of the universe, the magic of creation, the spark of life. It was everything. It was God. It was Stark.

  And Sataniel’s body could not contain it.

  He burned.

  And as he did, as his body was consumed by the light, Fabian Stark
thought: ”Burn with me.”

  When the World Ends

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  The shockwave hurled McCreedy from his feet and sent him sprawling across the cobbles. He hit the ground hard and continued to skid and slide across it until he hit the unforgiving wall of the nearest building. He slammed into it so forcefully he felt bones break under the impact, his arm and shoulder and more than one rib, and threatened to black out. He clung on stubbornly to consciousness, knowing that if he lost it he would never wake up again.

  Cain would see to that.

  Above him he saw the black shadows of the dead were burned into the brick wall, their only mortal remains the sooty scorch marks left behind by the blast. Each and every one of them was locked in a defensive pose that couldn’t have possibly saved them from the light. McCreedy clawed at the bricks, trying to move, to force his body to stand, but the wind kept battering him down. He felt the fine fur on his back singe and fuse together, and the sting of sand that wasn’t sand, sand that was fine grains of flesh, sand that was all that remained of Sataniel, but that was it. Where the others had been scoured from the face of the earth by the immense blast, he was barely scorched. He curled up, trying to summon the strength to move, but everything hurt. The winds howled all around him, purging the streets as they built and built, gathering into a cyclonic funnel that twisted and gyred around the few cobblestones where the devil had stood. McCreedy felt every inch of his exposed skin peeling from his body as the sediment carried by the raging wind whipped him bloody.

  The blinding light and the howling wind consumed everything, they burned, they cleansed, they ripped up and scattered, they scoured and they battered the streets into submission. The buildings couldn’t stand against them. The walls crumbled beneath the heat while loose bricks were hurled brutally aside by the wind to bounce and roll across the wide street. Windows, the few that had survived the violent tremors of the Golem’s rampage, shattered, adding glass daggers to the maelstrom.

  One such blade, a six-inch-long stiletto of glass, speared McCreedy in the sweetmeats. It sank in deep into the soft stuff of the wolfman, grating against the pelvic bone as it did. The pain was blinding and immediate, but rather than resist it, McCreedy welcomed it: it meant that he was still alive.

  He grasped the hot shard of glass by the little of it that was still exposed, and teased it out of his body barely quarter of an inch before the pain became excruciating. There was no way he could ease it out. Blood bubbled up from the cavity left behind by the glass dagger’s removal. Gritting his teeth, McCreedy pulled the glass splinter out with a single swift, sure motion, and screamed.

  There was so much blood.

  Too much, surely?

  He couldn’t dwell on it, not if he wanted to do something before he passed out.

  And he had to do something. Stark’s ghost had trusted him. They all had. He would not fail them.

  McCreedy rolled over onto his back, staring up at the stars as they struggled to assert themselves on the dawning sky. Theirs was a hopeless cause. Day was coming, ushered in by the Morning Star’s inferno.

  His eyes watered, stung to tears by the last remnants of the devil’s soul and the sands of his flesh.

  The cyclone had all but blown itself out in a few minutes of rage, but even so, the lingering heat was still so intense that McCreedy felt his flesh beginning to flense away from the bone and then it was gone, absolutely and completely, replaced by another sensation all together. One of calm.

  He lay there a moment more, then rolled over onto his side.

  There was no pain.

  His first thought was that he was dying, that the glass had punctured something vital and his body was shutting down, first the nerves, the pain receptors, and then the organs themselves, until finally his heart gave in and his own light burned out.

  He saw his blood staining the cobbled street. Beyond that dark red stain, he saw the shadow of the beast, the last black stain of Sataniel, being torn to shreds by that ghost light that had turned the Morning Star supernova, and through that, he saw the vampires, faces implacable as they watched the last moments of the danse macabre unfold, beyond them, he saw Cain coming toward him.

  But he was a shadow of the man he had been.

  The flesh on the left side of his face, the side turned to the devil as he burned, had melted down to the blackened bone beneath, lending him a rotten smile that stretched from his jawbone to his ear. But beneath the bone there was nothing but shadow, no meat. The damage continued down much of Cain’s left side, his clothes seared away, threads fused into the raw meat around his ribs and pelvis and down to his thigh, baring the ball joint through the smoking muscle and fatty tissue. The ribcage was broken, not merely caved in. McCreedy could see where the sternum had been torn apart. There was something in there, behind the ash that had gathered between the bones and the strings of fat that had cooked and dripped juices over them: a creature. A rancid-faced, ugly little thing. It leered out through the broken bones at him. This was Cain. This thing. Not the elegant killer in his tailored suit. This goblin that wore the elegant killer like his own tailored suit.

  And it was this wizened little monstrosity that he had to kill.

  If he could.

  And with what? The sword had fallen out of reach. Or rather he had tumbled and skidded on further, having more bulk for the wind to bully. Not that it mattered. Ramming the broken tip of a sword wasn’t guaranteed to slay the daemons in even the most child-friendly fairy tale. It wasn’t as though it were forged from a nail driven into the true cross, or baptised in the blood of the Messiah. It was a broken sword.

  But it was all he had.

  McCreedy got his knees under him. He needed the wall to stand, and even as he felt his legs buckle and put his weight against it, he felt the bricks shift and realised that the whole house could just as easily come down with one good push as he could.

  He moved away from the wall, stumbling three unsteady steps toward Mercy.

  Cain was in no better shape. The damage to his outer body was beyond debilitating. He had lost more than just a suit of skin and bone. He lurched toward the centre of the street, dragging his wounded leg.

  McCreedy bent down to claim the sword.

  And again, as he held it, it sang to him, begging mercy for Cain. McCreedy shook his head, trying to shake off the lethargy that had settled in with the shock. He was dying. He tentatively felt out the wound in his side. There was too much blood on his fingers when he withdrew his hand. There could be no mercy for Cain. It just wasn’t possible. The creature was too dangerous. It had escaped Hell and torn its way into Heaven. It had spilled the blood of angels and sided with the devil. How many other vile things had it done? This thing was whatever remained of Cain, son of Adam, exiled from Eden for murder. Knowing that, how could he spare it?

  But its own Father had, hadn’t he? All those millennia ago, when He offered it a fate worse than death, banishing it to the wilderness of Nod beyond the walls of Eden.

  This place, these streets, were its inheritance.

  It was an eternal exile.

  So was it mercy to spare it, or was it mercy to put an end to its rootless existence and lay the beast finally to rest?

  McCreedy didn’t have an answer, and he didn’t have the time to find one.

  The creature closed the gap between them.

  He could taste its rancid breath on the back of his throat.

  There were no words between them.

  They did not need them.

  McCreedy’s entire body shook. He didn’t bother trying to hide his trembling. He was frightened. He had good reason to be. He was facing down the first truly evil man ever to live. He’d be an idiot not to be frightened. There was nothing heroic about him in that moment. Had he not already been dead he would have run for his life, just as he had turned tail at Whitechapel and run, but there was nothing more than a few minutes left to run for, so he swallowed his fear and stood his ground. It was better t
o die trying than to simply die.

  McCreedy stared down the ruination that was Cain.

  He turned Mercy in a series of wicked cuts, rolling his wrist to build the momentum of the slashes to the point where the blade blurred almost completely out of existence. The air around the broken tip whickered as it was displaced.

  And they came together, two broken creatures in a battle to the death.

  The air was thick, and for that moment, without a sound save for the dragging of Cain’s ruined left foot across the cobbles.

  McCreedy winced against a fresh wave of pain as something tore inside him. He wasn’t about to complain; by rights he should have been one of those black-shadow silhouettes fused onto the red brick wall. He would gratefully accept a few more minutes of pain in exchange for escaping that fate.

  He made the sign of the cross over his chest. He might believe in Darwin over deities but he wasn’t about to spurn any help that might be on offer from above.

  And then he made his move.

  McCreedy was fast, deceptively so. He launched himself forward, all of his weight on his front foot, and slammed his fist into Cain’s face. McCreedy’s fist tenderised the raw meat of what had been Nathaniel Seth’s cheek and jaw with a punch that would have stopped a shire horse in its tracks, but not Cain. The daemon and his skin suit weren’t connected; there were no nerves that fed the dead man’s pain to the homunculus at his core. So, as McCreedy’s fist hammered into the dead man’s nose and ruptured the cartilage, and Cain’s head snapped back, it didn’t stop his counter. Cain drove his own fist into McCreedy’s side, deep into the gash the glass had opened up, stretching the bloody wound further still. As the blood seeped down his side McCreedy’s nerves blazed. There was no disconnect to protect him from the pain, they delivered every last ounce of it where it had to go, without fail.