The Wolves of London

by Mark Morris

  Stretching ahead of us was what looked like a huge brick pipe with a flat floor. There were smaller pipes, thick grey plastic ones, about the width of my thigh, attached to brackets running along the left-hand wall. I half-expected to have to wade through a river of human waste, but there was only a modest flow of rusty-looking water running along the central drain. Even the smell wasn’t so bad, dank and farty but bearable.

  Clover led the way, hurrying along despite the high heels she was still wearing, as if she knew exactly where she was going, the torchlight leaping eerily across the greasy walls. My mind still felt like a bag of broken glass, tinkling and sharp-edged with shock. Mostly it was occupied in trying to come to terms with, and make sense of, the incredible things I had seen tonight. Were those creatures real? If so, where had they come from? What did they want? But struggling to fight free of the bomb-blast debris in my mind came random, and more practical, thoughts and observations.

  I wondered whether Clover had had need to use this particular exit before; I wondered briefly whether we should call the police in case those… creatures swarmed out of the club and began to cause havoc in the London streets (and almost immediately I rejected the notion, thinking, entirely selfishly, of email man’s orders, of Kate’s safety). I wondered too whether the creatures were associated with email man – whether, in fact, the figure on the stage with the extendable arms and the too-wide smile was email man himself. My mind shied away from that possibility like a frightened horse. The thought of Kate in the clutches of those things…

  Eventually we came to another rusty-looking ladder and climbed up it. At the top was a square manhole cover, and it took the two of us, clinging awkwardly to opposite sides of the ladder, to push it up and over to one side. I had visions of climbing out and getting instantly mown down by a truck, but as I say we emerged to find ourselves in a dark alley round the back of a Chinese restaurant. Ironically, having just walked quarter of a mile through a sewer tunnel, it was the stale smell of steamed fish and vegetables drifting out of an air vent at the back of the building that made me double over with a sudden attack of stomach cramps.

  ‘You okay?’ Clover asked.

  I nodded and straightened up. ‘Just got to me for a second. I’ll be fine.’

  She switched off the torch and looked around. Her face was white and I could see she was trembling.

  ‘Back there,’ I said. ‘Those things. What were they?’

  She shook her head. Suddenly her face crumpled and she was sobbing.

  ‘Hey,’ I said softly. ‘Hey.’ I stepped forward and held her in my arms.

  Although I was comforting her I felt like a fraud. I felt like sobbing myself. She clung to me until the tears had run their course, and then she broke away, sniffing and wiping at her eyes, bringing herself under control.

  When she spoke her voice sounded almost normal. ‘Where to now?’

  ‘Back to my place?’ I suggested. ‘Cup of tea? Work out what to do next?’

  We both knew it was a risk, but our options were limited and we needed somewhere to get over what we’d been through. We trooped out into the street, which was still not deserted even though it was getting on for three in the morning. There were a few late-night revellers around, and one or two places that were just about open, but looked as if they’d be closing soon. We passed through the Chinatown arch on Gerrard Street and headed up to Shaftesbury Avenue looking for a cab. Finding one, I told the driver my address and then the two of us sank back into our seats. For the rest of the journey we sat in stunned and mutual silence, each affected by the night’s events and lost in our own thoughts.

  It was only when we turned the corner into my road that I stirred from my slumped position, leaning forward to scan the vehicles parked nose to tail along the length of each kerb. If I had spotted a police car, or even a vehicle with people sitting in it, I would have told the driver to keep going, but all seemed quiet.

  After instructing the driver where to stop, I roused Clover, who appeared to have slipped into a light doze. I paid the fare, then we hurried across the forecourt to the door of my building, my eyes darting right and left as my hand rooted in my pockets for keys. It was a relief to get inside and to hear the reassuring clunk of the lock behind us. As we trudged up the stairs it struck me how weary and hollow I felt – the result, I guessed, of adrenaline crash after the traumatic events of the evening. From the way Clover was moving – like someone leaving hospital after an operation – I guessed she felt the same way.

  We reached my landing and came to a halt. For a couple of seconds we simply stared at my door hanging off its hinges, a big dent edged with splintered wood visible beneath the handle. It looked as though the lock had been shattered with one almighty kick or perhaps with a whack from a sledgehammer.

  Clover and I exchanged glances. She was so exhausted that she looked drawn and disappointed rather than scared. I understood the expression, because I felt exactly the same way. I took a deep breath, gathering what little resources I had left, and said, ‘Wait here.’ I tiptoed across to the broken door and slowly pushed it open, reaching around the frame to switch on the light.

  There was nothing to see or hear. Just the small hallway, doors leading off. The doors to the bathroom and both mine and Kate’s bedrooms were open, the rooms beyond small enough for me to tell at a glance that they were unoccupied. The only closed door was that which led into the main room and the adjoining kitchen. Had I closed it earlier as I had left the flat? I couldn’t remember. Bracing myself, I sprang forward and shoved the door hard with both hands.

  If there had been someone crouched on the other side the door would have knocked them flying. But it didn’t happen. Instead the door just swung back, showing me a dark but apparently empty room.

  I glanced at Clover, standing in the corridor, looking anxious. ‘All clear, I think.’

  I was aware of her edging cautiously over the threshold and into the flat as I stepped into the main room. Backlit by the light from the hallway I knew that I made an obvious target, and so reached immediately for the square of plastic to my left. I slapped the switch down, squinting a little at the sudden glare, though my vision didn’t take much adjusting. I felt Clover at my back, trying to see around me.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she breathed.

  It was only when the light came on that I saw that the room had been trashed. The sofa and chairs had been shredded and turned over; books – including Kate’s Toy Story colouring book – had been torn apart and strewn about like dead birds; CDs had been dashed to the floor, their plastic casings crunched underfoot; the TV was lying on its back with a saucepan embedded in its glass screen.

  Clover’s exhalation had not been a response to the devastation, though. Spectacular though it was, her eyes – and mine – had been drawn almost immediately to the opposite wall. Spray-painted in big red letters on the pale wallpaper were five words:

  BEWARE THE WOLVES OF LONDON

  THIRTEEN

  THE EYE OF THE STORM

  Clover was asleep, breathing deep and long, her dark hair spread over the hotel pillow, and her face, now peaceful and relaxed after the traumas of the day, looking younger than her twenty-odd years. Her closed eyelids were a pale lilac colour and reminded me of butterfly wings in the dim light. One limp hand was resting against her cheek, as if she’d fallen asleep while sucking her thumb.

  Looking at her, I felt a protective ache in my belly, an urge to keep her from harm. It was nothing to do with sexual attraction. It was as if my feelings for Kate, with nowhere to go, had latched on to Clover instead.

  Although I was exhausted, my head was too busy for sleep. As well as feeling a duty to watch over Clover, I had so much to think about I barely knew where to start.

  After seeing the words daubed on the wall of my flat we had decided it was too risky to stay there. So we hit the streets again, sticking to the shadows and looking all around us as we hurried away from the building in case the Wolves of London, whoever
they were, were still hanging around. We came to a panting, jittery halt outside the closed, dark entrance to Chiswick Park tube station and called a cab from there. I suggested trying Clover’s place, but it turned out she lived in a flat above the club, so that was a no go. We therefore got the cab to take us back into the West End, where Clover and I both withdrew £500 each from a cash machine. Then we found a quiet little hotel near Bloomsbury Square and took a double room for the night – just somewhere to sleep and, if possible, recharge our batteries. We were so shattered we literally couldn’t think beyond that. A proper, coherent plan would have to wait until the morning.

  As soon as we locked the door of the room behind us, Clover staggered over to the bed and collapsed. Within seconds she was asleep, her body shutting down like it was deploying some kind of defence mechanism. I pulled off her shoes – God knows how she’d managed in those high heels all night – and threw the spare blanket from the walk-in wardrobe over her. Then I turned off all the lights apart from the little reading lamp above the desk, made myself a cup of tea and settled down in the armchair.

  I thought about taking a shower – I felt grubby and kept getting sharp, sweaty wafts of what was probably the by-product of concentrated adrenaline whenever I shifted position – but thinking about it was as far as I got. Not only did it seem like too much effort, I also didn’t like the thought of leaving Clover in the room on her own, or indeed of making myself vulnerable by standing naked behind a plastic curtain with water running into my eyes. So I did nothing but sit there, drinking tea and trying to make sense of what was going on. It struck me I was turning into a kind of Jonah, insomuch as many of the people with whom I’d been associated these past few days – my daughters, Clover, Barnaby McCallum, the two Japanese ‘businessmen’ – had suffered in one way or another. I wondered for the thousandth time what was happening and what my role in it all was. And I wondered too whether there was still further yet to fall, and how I would cope if there was.

  Sitting in the semi-darkness, Clover’s soft, slow breathing filling the room, I had the feeling that I was currently in the eye of the storm, huddled in a protective bubble, while all about swirled chaos and death and destruction. It wasn’t a comforting feeling. I knew that Clover and I couldn’t stay here for ever, and that sooner or later we would have to emerge and face the storm head on.

  At my request, Clover had checked her emails on her phone a few times since we’d fled the club, but there had been no further contact from email man. I’d checked my phone too, of course, and continued to do so, obsessively, every ten minutes or so, but zilch. Without realising I was doing it, I began, as I sat there thinking, to trace the outline of the obsidian heart in my breast pocket with my fingers and then to caress it through the material. As soon as it struck me what I was doing I felt uncomfortable, disturbed by my actions. I had the odd sense that the heart was almost like my own heart, or more specifically like a heart that was giving me trouble – burning in my chest, weighing heavily. There was no doubt that it was at the centre of everything that had happened. It was both a curse, in that it had caused so much trouble, and a blessing, because when it came to the question of keeping Kate alive it was my only bargaining tool.

  But what exactly was it? Where had it come from? Was it only a weapon or something else? Thinking of the tall man and his menagerie of half-organic, half-clockwork creatures, I even found myself wondering whether the heart was of this world or whether it was from… where? Outer space? Some secret world within our own where things existed that had managed to keep themselves hidden for hundreds, maybe thousands of years?

  Though outwardly I was calm, inwardly my thoughts were still raging, my mind crippled with anxiety for Kate, and struggling to come to terms with what it had seen tonight, trying to fit square pegs into round holes. I took the heart out of my pocket and began to pass it from hand to hand, playing with it the same way someone might play with a set of worry beads. My fingers moved restlessly over the knobbly, veined surface as if feeling for a hidden catch, a secret opening, a way in. Funnily enough, it never occurred to me that the thing might be dangerous, that what had happened to McCallum might happen to me too. Maybe I was so beset with worry and confusion that I simply didn’t care, though I don’t think that was it. It was more a sense, almost a conviction, not only that I was the heart’s protector, but that it somehow knew that I was.

  I leaned to one side so that the yellow light from the lamp beside me shone on the heart’s gleaming surface. I went over every millimetre of it with my fingers and eyes, looking for cracks or… I don’t know; just wanting it to give up its secrets, in the hope that I might better understand what was going on. At one point I even held the heart up in front of my face, like a jeweller examining a diamond. But nothing happened. Just as in Incognito, the heart stubbornly refused to become anything other than what it appeared to be, an egg-sized human organ carved out of black stone.

  At last I sighed and sat back, the seat creaking beneath me. On the bed, Clover gave a little moan and half-turned over, then settled again. For once London was silent. I could hear nothing outside the room but the faint background hum of the universe. I looked at the heart for a couple of seconds longer, then curled my fingers around it and squeezed.

  ‘Come on,’ I muttered. ‘Come on.’

  I closed my eyes, then opened them again. The room was the same as before. The heart was still a rock-like lump in my hand, unmoving, unyielding.

  ‘Fuck you then,’ I whispered, and slipped the thing back into my pocket. Needing a piss, I leaned forward to push the dead weight of my weary body out of the seat. I looked across at the half-open door of the bathroom, at the wedge of darkness between door and frame.

  The darkness moved.

  My own heart leaped like it had been jump-started and my hands gripped the arms of the chair. My brain told me I should be on my feet, leaping into action, but I couldn’t move. I watched as the bathroom door opened slowly and soundlessly, not all the way, just enough to reveal the silhouette of a figure. The figure was slight, and beneath its black bulb of a head it seemed to glimmer like a ghost. Then it stepped out of the shadows and light fell across it, and I gasped in recognition.

  It was Lyn, the mother of Kate. But Lyn was in a psychiatric hospital on the south coast; had been there for five years. Her presence here now was astonishing, not only because she was here at all, but also because this wasn’t the raddled, reduced Lyn I now visited on an irregular basis, but the beautiful, gentle, radiant Lyn I had first known and loved years before. And what pushed the visitation from astonishing into the realm of the impossible was the fact that this was also pregnant Lyn, five or six months gone, before all the trouble had started. I stared in amazement at the bulging belly beneath the knee-length nightshirt she wore.

  I remembered that nightshirt. I might even have bought it for her. It was white with a repeated cherry design on it, and it had short sleeves edged in lace trim. I noticed that Lyn was even wearing the bangles and rings she wasn’t allowed to wear any more, and her fingernails and toenails (her feet were bare) were painted a bright candyfloss pink. She was smiling at me, that old mischievous smile that exposed her dimples, her eyes wide and blue beneath her ash-blonde fringe.

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. It wasn’t until she shimmered that I realised I was crying.

  She looked at me for several seconds, and on her face was compassion, love even. Then she spoke, and her voice was not the cracked mutter or the barbed-wire screech I was now used to. It was soft and warm and sexy, like it used to be.

  ‘Take care, Alex,’ she said. ‘The wolves are coming.’

  Then, her hands cupping her pregnant belly, she stepped back into the bathroom and was swallowed by the shadows.

  ‘No!’ I croaked, and that was when I felt my body jerk and my eyes tear open, and I realised, with a mixture of despair and relief, that I had been dreaming. The dream had been so vivid, though, that I stood up, the heart rolling
off my lap and on to the floor with a thump. I rushed across to the bathroom, wrenched open the door and turned on the light. I was half-thinking that if I was quick enough I might still catch Lyn before she went back to wherever she had come from. But the bathroom was empty, and the harsh light reflecting off the white tiles was like fingernails scraping down the blackboard of my brain.

  I don’t know whether it was this, or the dream, or simply a delayed reaction to everything that had happened that night, but suddenly, for about the fifth time in as many hours, I got a fierce attack of stomach cramps. This time I knew I wouldn’t be able to will it away, and so I threw myself down on the floor in front of the toilet and stuck my head in the bowl. A second later I hurled up everything I had eaten and drunk since killing the old man, which wasn’t much – tea, toast, a couple of shortbread biscuits that had been on the tea tray in the hotel room. It took several good heaves to get my stomach empty and then I was retching up foul-tasting bile which burned my throat.

  Eventually my guts stopped cramping and I slumped away from the vomit-spattered toilet and on to my back. The light on the ceiling looked impossibly high and impossibly bright, like an icy sun glaring down on a cold, white desert.

  My last coherent thought was that I had to go back into the other room, protect Clover and safeguard the heart.

  Then the light above me seemed to flare like an exploding sun, and I remembered nothing more.

  FOURTEEN

  THE DARK MAN

  When I offered to buy her a drink, she laughed tipsily and said, ‘I’ll have something cheap and tarty.’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Something with sambuca in it.’

  I knew she was teasing me. Testing me, even. Matching her grin with my own, I said, ‘I hope that’s not what you are?’