London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

  And then he found the head.

  It stared at him with huge, gaping maws where its eyes should have been. There was nothing but darkness inside. Close now, he stopped running. He saw Locke’s clothes piled on the floor by the Golem’s ugly iron teeth. He stooped to gather them up, and then changed his mind. It wasn’t going to matter one whit whether Locke was naked or not. He wasn’t thinking straight. Something fell from his pocket and hit the ground with a soft tink. It looked like a coin as it glinted in the rising sun, but as he scooped it up Dorian saw that it wasn’t a coin at all. It was a small silver disc embossed with the McCreedy family crest. He pocketed the disc and plunged into the Golem’s mouth, calling out, ”Bran! Bran! Stay with me, Bran. I’m coming,” as he ducked under the rusty teeth.

  It was dark inside the Golem’s head. Shadows masked all but a few of the sigils engraved into the metal skull. The few that the morning sun exposed revealed more facets of the Golem’s purpose. Dorian recognised them as means to manipulate the veil between the oblique worlds. This thing was a war machine made to hunt and gather souls. Well, it will reap no more, he thought, clambering over an iron brace. More than half of the girders that supported the skull plates had torn loose and formed a lattice of over-under cross ties for him to negotiate on his way to Locke.

  Locke hadn’t moved since he had left him.

  The edge of a huge iron plate pressed down on his spine. It had cut deep into Locke and he was bleeding. His entire torso was impossibly twisted, leaving him to stare up at the sky.

  ”I’m here,” he said, kneeling beside his friend.

  Locke smiled weakly. ”I can’t feel my legs,” he said. His face was bleached bone-white and his eyes couldn’t seem to focus on Dorian. Shock, blood loss, pain.

  ”This is going to hurt,” Dorian apologised, working his fingers beneath the edge of the iron plate. ”But there’s nothing I can do about it if we’re going to get you out of here.”

  ”Do it,” Locke said, closing his eyes, expecting more pain.

  He braced himself and heaved upwards with all of his might, but the damned thing barely moved more than an inch before it slipped through his fingers. It came down hard, grinding the already twisted and broken bones of Locke’s back.

  ”Didn’t feel a thing,” Locke said. He knew what that meant. They both did.

  ”I can’t do this, Bran, I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  ”It was my choice, Dor, don’t make me regret it, damn you.”

  Dorian shook his head. ”I can’t do it. I’m just not strong enough. Hold on. One more minute. Just hold on,” and so saying he disappeared back out of the Golem’s slack-jawed mouth. He came back a few minutes later with three roustabouts, each one of them big enough and burley enough to lift the plate by themselves. Together, they pried it up high enough for Dorian to drag Locke out from beneath it. If any of the roustabouts found it odd that they were rescuing a naked man from inside a giant iron statue of another naked man none of them let on. They dusted themselves off, made a crack about Father London being worth a few bob in scrap, and went in search of more people who needed their strength.

  Locke didn’t say a word until they were back in the street.

  ”Take me home,” he said.

  Dorian gathered his friend into his arms and started to walk.

  It took him an hour to reach the lodging house on Grays Inn Road, and it was Dorian’s turn to be silent.

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  The Seven that had become Six watched as the daemon Cain died. They felt no satisfaction at its failure, but neither did they rejoice in the half-wolf’s triumph. It was neither here nor there to them. Their charge was simple, they were to watch, they were not to meddle. They had been set to wait for His return, but even before the glory of the Morning Star burned out they knew their waiting was not done. They could have saved the homunculus. They could have turned on the half-wolf. But sometimes it was good to let events reveal themselves. Call it fate, kismet, destiny, providence, call it the stars, chance, luck, call it serendipity, fortune, or karma, call it anything, it came down to the same thing: theirs was not to interfere.

  They were the gatekeepers of the London Wall.

  They were Nightwalkers, more dangerous than any of the morning’s survivors. Much like the Gentleman Knights they were charged with protecting a place, but their place was far older than any stone houses, as old as the first man himself. It was not London, though it existed in the same place and time as that infernal city. It was Eden. As long as the secrets of the Garden remained safe it was not their place to interfere in the misery of London.

  Eden would abide.

  That was all that mattered.

  But things had changed irrevocably. Uriel was dead, killed by the homunculus Cain, and worse, by far, one of their number had broken the covenant. The Cripple Gate vampire had paid the ultimate price for its disloyalty. It was no more. But now that gate was unguarded and would remain that way forever.

  That was too high a cost for them to bear.

  Lud Gate and Ald Gate moved first. The others followed. No one challenged them as they gathered around the skin suit that had been Nathaniel Seth and the wizened daemon trapped within its shattered bones. They ignored the barely conscious McCreedy lying in his own blood and bent down to crack open the corpse and recover the homunculus’s remains. They made a mess of the skin suit, like vultures feasting, and when they stood they held the daemon’s remains between them.

  They formed an unholy funeral cortege as they walked through the city, but no one looked at them. They did not see them because they simply didn’t want to see them. Daemons, vampires, they were outside any decent Londoner’s ken. They didn’t belong, so they didn’t register in their minds, not with so much else demanding to be seen.

  The procession wound through the solemn streets.

  The city was suffering.

  But it was not their place to soothe it.

  They carried the corpse between them all the way to the Cripple Gate. The gate was open. Behind it lay the burned and blasted remnants of Eden. Cain’s homunculus weighed less than nothing in their arms as they carried it into the archway. All Cain had ever wanted was to turn home from exile.

  This much they could give him in death.

  But they could not take him beyond the arch, into the garden. They could not lay him to rest beside his brother, that went against what had been ordained. The son of Adam was exiled. They could not break his banishment.

  As they laid him down beneath the keystone the Lud Gate vampire turned to his brethren. There were no words needed between them, they were of a single mind in this. The gate could not be left unguarded for eternity, and as a guardian, a watcher, a Nightwalker, Cain would never have to set foot inside Paradise but would forever be its protector. It would never know, though. There would be none of the mortal memories of the damned man once the vampire brought him over into the unlife. His body would serve them, not his soul. That was free to move on to whatever damnation God had in store for him. The wind whispered around them, a lullaby of sorts, though there was no comfort in it. It was a song to soothe the dead. The sun rose higher into the morning, clearing the church spires and the weathercocks and stretching the shadows into a land fit for giants. The vampires themselves cast no discernible shadow, and neither did the Cripple Gate.

  The Lud Gate vampire knelt and gathered Cain’s remains into his arms. There was such tenderness in it, the vampire’s long white fingers soothing over the homunculus’s deeply wrinkled brow as he leaned in to kiss the corpse’s blue lips. Its kiss lingered and with its free hand the vampire cupped the back of the homunculus’ head, and breathed death into it.

  The creature opened its eyes.

  There was no intelligence there, only loyalty.

  ”Rise, Cripple Gate, and take your place,” the Lud Gate vampire commanded, stepping away from the newly born Seventh. His brothers gathered around to pay their respects.

  In the Garden, the
shoots of the first new flower began to poke up through the scorched earth. All was not dead in the Garden.

  And even as the first kiss of the sun touched its leathery skin, the thing that had once held the soul of Cain turned to stone and the gate closed behind it.

  There would be no homecoming.

  The God Particle VII

  Chapter Ninety-Three

  Scattered, the essence of Sataniel, that ancient evil, existed everywhere and everywhen as a singular energy, a light, a spark, brighter than the sun. It burned in the fabric of every living thing and in the rotting flesh of every dead thing. It hid within the wrinkles of time itself. It swelled to fill the shadows of memory and the dark spaces between hope and desire. It echoed in the words said in fear. It shone in the black hearts of men and in their blacker deeds.

  And Fabian Stark could feel it in its entirety because he had made it. In destroying the Morning Star he had scattered the devil throughout every moment in human history, even those yet to come. He had let it set its roots down. He could not leave it there to fester and worm away at the good that men would do. He couldn’t let that impossible light change people. But he could see everything, from the beginning to the end, and all of the possibilities in between and he knew that left to burn, nurtured, fanned, the flame would ultimately claim the victory it so hungered for, and would become the light ascendant.

  The curiosity that evil should linger in the light intrigued him. Before he had said farewell to mortal flesh he had believed the darkness was where secrets and lies flourished, that the dark was where the bad things lurked, but in death he knew different. The light masked more evils, more twisted sins, than the dwellers of the dark could ever imagine.

  In death Fabian Stark was stronger than he ever could have been in life.

  He was not afraid of the light.

  And it had all been about this singular moment, this one possibility: he fled through time and space, through the core that connected every moment like a ribbon, and left. Simply left. He stood beyond the beginning, outside of the infinity of here and now and there and then, in this place that could not and should not have been. He let his awareness spread out to fill the nothingness that existed before time itself, knowing that his purity would be irresistible to Sataniel’s hateful light. Such was the pernicious nature of evil, in its hunger to bath the world in its light it consumed more and more of the good and the pure, needing its innocence to fuel it. Otherwise it merely cannibalised itself, evil is as evil does. And such evil could live on in a vacuum, never dying. As long as it had time to flourish.

  That was the essence of Stark’s plan.

  Time.

  He was connected to all of it, but here, through the wormhole at the heart of it, to that moment where there was nothing, where even time ceased to be, there was no connection, no resonance of history to fire his awareness. Here he simply was. Alone. It was the perfect prison in the making.

  Burn with me, Stark thought, imagining himself as a single dancing flame to lure the devil into his trap.

  His essence flickered though there was no wind. It fanned, burning a little higher and a little brighter.

  And again he let his awareness sing that siren song: Burn with me.

  The curiosity found him. That was the essence of Sataniel, that insatiable curiosity, that need to know, to taste all, to own it. The devil was like a magpie drawn to bright shiny things. In this case it was a soul where it shouldn’t be.

  Stark felt the other’s presence though it chose not to reveal itself, preferring to skirt around his flame, feel the flicker of his heat, and wonder at what had brought a human soul here, to this place before it all began.

  Show yourself, Stark commanded, the sheer power of his awareness transforming the nothingness into something, words.

  In the beginning there was the word.

  And the word was God.

  The nothing sizzled with a single radiant thought, a spark, and in that spark Stark found what he was looking for, not God, far from it in truth. In that spark Fabian Stark found the essence of all evil. Fabian Stark found the thing that men called by so many names: Phosphorous, Light-Bearer, Morning Star, Day Star, Stella Matutina, Venus, Lumiel, The Torch of Baphomet, Masema, Devil, Azazel, Eosphorus, Satariel, Baal Davar, Lucifer, Belial, Serpent, Tempter, Iblis, Adversary, and Satan to name but a few. But there was only one that mattered: The Devil.

  Even here its light was beautiful.

  And for a moment Stark’s resolve faltered.

  How could he hope to defeat such might? Who was he to think he could stand against the Devil in all his majesty? How could he be foolish enough—arrogant enough—to believe he could root out the one constant that burned during the entirety of human history, from the first thought to the last? It was hubris, plain and simple. And it would be his undoing. The Devil would take his awareness and shred it thought by thought until nothing of him remained, and then he would sprinkle those shreds like a confetti of disjointed memories throughout everywhen. Time was not a thief, time was a hoarder, scavenger. Once it had them it would not let those precious shreds go. He would never find himself, and Sataniel would blaze on, triumphant.

  He could not bear to look at the light any longer.

  He could feel it starting to burn inside him.

  He could not allow himself to be turned from his purpose. Nothing had changed since he looked into the nothing and found the Devil. He was still Fabian Stark. He was still the same man. But everything was different.

  So instead he turned his awareness to the rift, the hole in time that had allowed him to lure the Devil out of it. It was the smallest tear, a flaw. It was the wound left by umbilicus that bound God to their creation. That was the revelation that came with this new awareness, the understanding that they were all in some small way an aspect of the thing we call God. That this God of ours would only come into being as all of us, all of those consciousnesses and personalities, all of those men and women that made up humanity returned to where we were been born, and in coming together we would remake God.

  God was not dead.

  God was alive in each and every one of his creations. God was the sum of the perfections and the flaws. God was the entirety of the one hundred billion souls that had ever lived and ever would live, crying out to be heard all at once. God was omnipotent because God was everywhere and everywhen.

  God was us.

  And in that understanding we were all sons of God. We were all divine.

  And that was why the Devil craved our purity, and why, even now, outside of time and space, he could not help but be drawn to the light that was Fabian Stark.

  It was why he could not help but preen, and show his might, drawing every spark of his being that Stark had scattered throughout history to this place, and began to manifest, revealing his true form.

  He was vast beyond measure, the flame of his core transforming his skin to iridescent fire, like lava bubbling just beneath the surface. His face was that of the beast from every nightmare. His gnarled horns and cloven hooves, everything humanity had every feared. The fires of Hell smouldered in his eyes, smoke poured from his mouth. And still he grew, drawing more and more of the stuff of evil to feed his manifestation, until there was nothing out there, and everything had manifested in the nothingness, in that moment, Fabian Stark sacrificed himself for the third and final time.

  This time, once he became an ascendant being, there could be no coming back. The sum of the memories and thoughts that had been Fabian Stark would cease to be separate forever. He would return to that state of grace, giving himself to the mosaic of lives that formed the universe.

  And in that moment, as Stark gave himself to God, helping re-form one hundred billionth of the divine soul, he became the keystone, the lock, that would seal that wound where the umbilicus had been attached. He would become that first moment, and all before him would cease to be, locked forever out of time. There would be no salvation for him, but even as he sealed the wound and
touched everywhere and everywhen for the last time, he allowed himself a moment’s grace, appearing to his friends in their time of greatest need. He whispered, ”Look back,” in Brannigan Locke’s ear as he slipped out of the Conclave, knowing that because of those two words he would not only see the vampire slip through the door after him, but that he would see the green man above the door and understand at least part of the puzzle. He urged Mason to go down to the al kimia and find the Distillator, knowing it was the only thing that would save him as the tunnel beneath the Thames flooded into it. And as McCreedy lay beaten and half dead, he bade the wolf to follow him as his lion bound away. He begged Dorian to ”Find him,” even as Locke’s soul took its first step on the journey into death, knowing his friend would at least have the choice to fight on. He touched them all, giving them that last little piece of him. It was all they needed. He encouraged Millington to do what he had always done, to talk to God’s creatures. There was no magic in what he did. He simply gave himself to his friends.

  And in the darkness of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, while the unfortunates wrestled with their own devils and daemons he found the girl, and told her it was time to run … and once again down by the water to tell her the truth, that ”Her ghost lingers …”

  As Eugene Napier stood on the Sanctuary steps he pleaded with him to turn back, begged him, filling his being with love for his brothers, and when he did not falter, with guilt and fear and doubt, but Napier could not be saved. He shook off his warnings, choosing instead to believe he could fool Hathor and Bast and the rest of the Brethren into believing he was a traitor to his brother knights and, once inside, would be better placed to tear the Sanctuary apart stone by stone, sealing the rift to that other London where they came from.

  And then he was gone from their lives, as completely and utterly as that.

  The keystone fell into place, closing the wound in time, and Stark slipped away to join the mosaic of memories and minds, becoming truly immortal.