by Mark Morris
I stared at him. His logic was irrefutable. All the same, trying not to sound desperate, I said, ‘What if you’re wrong?’
He shrugged. ‘Then who would know, besides the people in this room?’
I didn’t know what to say to that. Partly because I was itching to snatch the heart from his hand and stuff it back into my pocket, I folded my arms and leaned back. I watched helplessly as Jensen stood, walked across the room and handed the heart to the PC by the door, murmuring instructions.
The PC nodded and slipped out of the room. I felt fresh sweat spring out on my scalp and run down my face. I palmed it away with a shaking hand as Jensen strolled back to his seat. Now I felt not like a parent losing a child, but like a junkie denied a fix.
‘Are you all right, Mr Locke?’ asked Jensen, sitting down again. ‘You don’t look well.’
‘I’ve had a bug this week,’ I muttered, hardly aware of what I was saying. ‘Flu or something. Just run down, I suppose.’
Jensen arranged his features into an expression of concern. ‘I expect it’s the stress. Would you like me to get you anything? A glass of water? Cup of tea?’
‘Yes, water would be—’ Then I felt a sudden itch in my throat and barked a cough so violent it jerked my head forward. Pressing a clenched fist to my mouth, I was horrified to see that behind Jensen the air was shimmering, boiling, turning hazy. Jensen, unaware of the phenomenon, was frowning, his nose twitching at the acrid stench now creeping into the room. Abruptly the patch of hazy air thickened, erupting outwards like an underwater explosion, filling the room with yellow smog. Coughing now, also pressing a fist to his mouth, he began to rise from his chair, a look of bafflement on his face. I croaked a warning as a dark shape loomed from the yellow smog behind him, but I was too late. Jensen had barely begun to turn before Hulse stepped up behind him and, in one swift motion, slashed his throat.
The cut was so deep, so savage, that Jensen was almost beheaded by it. The wound gaped like a second mouth as his head tilted back, and instinctively I threw myself sideways as blood jetted across the table towards me. My chair toppled and I crashed to the floor, the jet of blood, followed by several others, shooting over my head and zigzagging across the wall. I felt pinpricks of it speckle my face as I slithered across the floor on my backside, kicking the chair away from me and propelling myself with my feet. I wanted to put as much distance as I could between Hulse and myself, but when I finally scrambled upright and looked across the table there was no sign of the cut-throat, and the yellow smog was already dispersing, rushing towards a central point as though being sucked into a hole. Within seconds I was alone with Jensen’s body, which was now spreadeagled, face down, across the table. There was so much blood – on the table beneath him, drooling on to the floor and spattered across the far wall – that it looked as though someone had gone crazy with a tin of red paint.
Although deeply shocked by what had happened, my immediate concern, I’m ashamed to say, was for my own welfare. If someone had walked into the room at that moment they would have had no option but to assume I had murdered the DI. Later it would occur to me that there was very little blood on my hands and clothes and no sign of a murder weapon, but at that moment I was panicking. I glanced up at the walls, this time hoping to see a surveillance camera, but there was nothing to suggest that what had taken place had been either recorded or witnessed. I walked around the edge of the room, keeping away from the body, and taking care not to step in the blood which was already creeping across the floor. I reached the door and tried the handle and whispered a silent prayer of thanks when it opened. Clearly it hadn’t been deemed necessary to lock it when Jensen was in the room.
I stepped into a corridor lined with doors. On the opposite wall a pair of fire doors led to a staircase, which I knew would take me down to the reception area, across from which was the main entrance that led to the outside world and freedom. From behind a closed door further down on my left came bustling office sounds – the buzz of chatter, the creak of chairs, the clatter of fingers on keyboards, the whine of a printer or photocopier. My over-riding instinct was to flee the building, but I couldn’t leave without the heart. But where was it? How could I find it? I didn’t have the first clue where to look.
I froze as the door to the large office opened, the sounds of activity swelling momentarily like a swarm of bees released from a box. A woman stepped into the corridor and pushed the door closed behind her. She turned to me and smiled. My mouth dropped open.
It was Lyn.
As on the previous occasions I had seen her beyond the confines of Darby Hall, this was the Lyn of yesteryear, before the ‘dark man’ had entered her life. And as before, she was pregnant and radiant, dressed in the white nightshirt with the cherry design, her feet bare, her fingernails and toenails painted a bright cheerful pink, her slim wrists bedecked with bangles.
Those bangles jangled now as she beckoned me. ‘Come on, Alex,’ she said. ‘Hurry.’
She turned and began to stride away, heading deeper into the building. With a twinge of regret I glanced at the fire door and then hurried after her.
She was maybe ten metres ahead of me, moving quickly despite her bulging belly. As she reached the end of the corridor, I was striding past the long, busy office on my left, inside which I could see dark shapes moving through a row of frosted windows. Whoever might happen to look up at the windows from the other side would no doubt see the blur of my head passing from one to the next, but thankfully nobody emerged to check who I was or what I was doing. As Lyn turned right into the next corridor, I put on a spurt of speed, knowing that her presence was so ephemeral that to lose sight of her momentarily might mean losing her completely. My heart was thumping with anxiety as I rounded the corner – but there she still was, half a dozen metres ahead of me. Her blond hair swished as she shifted her weight from one side to the other, and her bare feet even made slight indentations in the carpet.
She stopped at a door two-thirds of the way down the corridor on her right. Although she glanced back as if to check I was still with her, she didn’t say anything and she didn’t wait for me; she pushed open the door and entered.
Or at least, I thought she had pushed open the door, but when I reached it I discovered it was still closed. Screwed to the door was a brushed-steel nameplate, the name itself indented in black: Detective Inspector F. Jensen.
I didn’t knock and I didn’t hesitate. I turned the handle and pushed the door open. Beyond was a small office, no more than half a dozen metres square. Directly in front of me was a neatly arranged desk, behind which a large window offered a view which was two-thirds sky and one-third birdshit-smeared rooftops. There was no sign of Lyn, but standing behind the desk, pulling open one of the desk drawers, was DI Jensen – the same DI Jensen whose throat I had seen slashed from ear to ear. Glancing at me with something like irritation, he reached into the drawer and withdrew the obsidian heart, which he brandished like a rock he intended to whack me across the head with. Immediately the air shimmered around him and his outline started to blur.
Without thinking what I was doing, and in defiance of my stiff and aching body, I leaped up on to the desk and hurled myself at him. I hit him like a rugby player making a tackle, my full weight causing him to hurtle backwards. With me still clinging to him, he hit the window at such a speed that the glass simply gave way, shattering outwards. I had the fleeting impression that we were surrounded by jagged chunks of glittering sky.
Then we were falling.
TWENTY-SEVEN
GASLIGHT
There was a smell.
Something chemical.
Chloroform?
Was I in hospital?
My eyes seemed to be glued closed and I couldn’t summon up the energy to open them. I felt as if I was somehow below the surface of my body, as if my consciousness was wallowing in thick, black darkness, unable to influence my physical self, which was somewhere above me, out of reach. For the time being I could only th
ink, remember. I recalled the uncontrollable, stomach-lurching sensation of falling from a great height. I remembered tumbling over and over, broken glass like shards of lethal-edged light cascading around me, the wind screaming, my hands gripping the lapels of Jensen’s jacket and refusing to let go. And then…
Nothing. A blank. An absence. No sense of time passing, no dreams, not even darkness. I was gone and then I was… here. Aware but detached. Able to think, to smell…
To hear?
Yes. All it took was a slight shift in perception, and I became aware of sounds. Echoing clangs and clanks. A slight, persistent hiss. A wordless shout of pain or fear that seemed to come from far away.
And touch? Could I feel anything? I tried to connect with my muscles and bones, to imagine my fingers and toes twitching, even to tap into the memory of pain from my bruised and battered body. But I couldn’t. There was nothing. Was I dead? Was my consciousness, my soul, somehow trapped inside my mortally injured corpse? Panic surged, but it was slow and inexorable, like a vast, black wave of something more cloying, more terrible than water. I felt it rising above me, closing over my head. My thoughts broke apart and I let it fill me.
I slept.
When I next woke things were different. I knew immediately that I was closer to the surface. My eyes behind their closed lids felt hot and itchy and swollen. The pain that I could feel throbbing in my limbs was almost welcoming. The smells and sounds were sharper, more varied. The chemical odour was mingled with that of wood or pipe smoke, of hot oil or candle wax, of something dank and slightly musty. I heard footsteps, voices, the rattle of wheels, the clatter of hooves on stone, the general bustle of activity, all of which were muffled, distant, almost soothing. I was aware of something supporting my head, of my body from the chest down smothered by a covering that was prickly, and that smelled a little stale.
I tried to move my fingers, but again I couldn’t manage it. Was I paralysed? Had I broken my spine in the fall from the police station window? Had I been in a coma, and if so for how long?
I struggled to communicate – to speak, to open my eyes. I felt the blood rushing to my brain. I felt trapped inside myself. I pushed and pushed, my eyes beneath the closed lids smarting, bulging, filling with heat as if about to burst. I wanted to scream, to thrash, but I couldn’t move. I had an explosion building inside me, an uprush of energy with nowhere to go.
And then… light! Suddenly, unexpectedly. It was only a sliver, a chink, a tear, but it was searing, liberating, wonderful.
Once the breakthrough had been made it was easier. It was like cracking a carapace that had been encasing my body, like breaking out of an egg. I felt – imagined – the thin shell falling away. I struggled into the light, floundering, gasping, clawing at the air. I forced my eyelids apart, the tiny muscles around my eyes straining, aching, working like pulleys to prise open grit-encrusted window shutters. As the light seeped in, it flooded my brain, acting like a balm, soothing and reviving.
The first thing I saw was a row of windows to my left. Beyond them I glimpsed movement – birds? Pigeons, maybe? It was hard to tell, not only because daylight was filtering through and making my smarting eyes water, but because the windows were small and high up and coated with a thick layer of grime. I blinked, tried to lift my hand to wipe my eyes, but it was unresponsive. Perhaps I was paralysed, though at that moment the thought didn’t distress me as much as it ought to have done. I was just glad to have broken out of the darkness, to feel the daylight on my face. One thing at a time. Softly, softly, catchee monkey, as my dad used to say.
I blinked the tears away. Blinked and blinked until my vision was clear. I moved my head, looked around. I was in a small room, lying on my back on an iron-framed bed. The room had mustard-yellow walls, a bare wooden floor, wooden fixtures and fittings. To my left, below the row of windows, was a workbench stretching the length of the room, which was cluttered with equipment, all of it archaic. There were glass phials; test tubes in wooden stands; a bell jar containing a contraption that was all brass handles and curly wires and hand-blown light bulbs. There was a chunky box-like affair studded with brass dials beneath a half-moon display of hand-written numbers and a metal indicator needle, from the back of which rubber tubing trailed like an array of severed tentacles.
The right-hand wall was composed of a wooden frame divided into a grid of smaller frames, each no larger than a metre or so square. Each of these frames contained a mosaic of darkly coloured stained glass – no elaborate designs, simply rectangles of orange, brown and green glass fused together in haphazard patterns. The glass was thick, almost opaque, the effect of the design – though crude – autumnal, forest-like. It made me think of a screen of foliage through which seeped murky, dappled light.
The centrepiece of the wall of glass was a sturdy wooden door with a brass handle. There was no electric light in the room. Instead four gas lamps at head height provided what would presumably be the only illumination once the daylight faded.
Where was I? And more to the point, when was I? I could only surmise that the heart had done its thing, and that as Jensen (or the thing that looked like Jensen) and I had fallen, it had zapped us somewhere else.
So what year was this? Unless this place was some kind of museum, the evidence seemed to suggest I’d travelled back a century, maybe more. From my surroundings, and from the chemical smell, I would guess I was in a hospital, maybe a laboratory. The room reminded me of a set from a Hammer horror movie – not a pleasant thought. As I shook off the last muzzy threads of unconsciousness, I realised that the movement I could see beyond the grime-furred windows was people – or at least their legs and feet – moving to and fro.
So this must be a basement then, or at least a room slightly below ground level. From the echoing and often distant quality of the sounds beyond the door to my right, I’d guess that there was a corridor out there, or a series of corridors. I might have been wrong, but I had the impression of size, of a large building filled with many rooms.
I looked down at myself. I was wearing what appeared to be a white gown or nightshirt and was mostly covered by a coarsely woven grey blanket that made me think of the army. I tried to sit up, but realised that although I could now move my fingers and toes freely, I couldn’t lift my arms or legs. I wondered again whether I was paralysed – and then suddenly it struck me. There was nothing physically wrong with me. I’d been restrained, strapped to the bed.
A wriggle of fear went through me and I looked again at the workbench on my left. I was only partly relieved to see there were no surgical implements on there, nothing that might be construed as a torture device. Presumably I was a prisoner here, but who were my captors? The Wolves of London? Hulse and his cronies? I was desperate to know, but at the same time reluctant to find out.
Clenching my fists, I flexed my muscles and pulled. The restraints held firm. Whoever my captor or captors were, he, she or they would be able to do whatever they liked to me. What did they want? The heart? Information? I guessed the latter, because otherwise why was I still alive? Which I supposed must mean that when I had arrived here, I hadn’t had the heart with me.
Before I could think about it further, I heard footsteps in the corridor outside. They weren’t the first footsteps I’d heard since waking up, but they were the first ones that were close, and getting closer. They were measured, casual, and – to my ears – ominous. I tensed, tugged again at the restraints, but they were immovable. I twisted my head to look at the door, a pulse jumping wildly in my throat. The knob turned and the door opened.
A man in a sombre tweed suit, albeit with black velvet lapels, stepped into the room. He was tall and bald with a pale, narrow face, his eyes encircled by small round spectacles. His lips were thin, but so red you might have thought he’d been eating strawberries. He was spindly, and he smelled strongly of the chloroform odour that I had detected when I’d woken up. Although he was just a man, and nothing like the monstrous creature I had encountered previously,
I recognised him at once.
It was the Surgeon.
‘Ah, the sleeper wakes,’ he said, and smiled, displaying large yellow teeth, many of which were threaded darkly with decay. As he approached I began to squirm and thrash, to struggle frantically against my bonds.
‘Get away from me!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t fucking touch me!’
The smile slipped and he looked momentarily taken aback, but then his lips curled upwards and he unsheathed his teeth once more.
‘Don’t take on so, my friend,’ he said soothingly. ‘No one here means you harm.’
‘Keep back!’ I warned, and then as he took a step closer I began to shout as loudly as I could. ‘Help me! Someone! Help!’
The Surgeon raised his right hand. In it was an old-fashioned hypodermic syringe with brass finger loops either side of the plunger.
‘There really is no need to concern yourself,’ he purred. ‘You are entirely safe, I assure you. I have a suppressant here which will ease your agitation and enable you to relax.’
I continued to struggle, to scream for help, but no one came. The Surgeon placed his left hand on my shoulder and held me down with surprising strength. Then, yellow teeth gritted, he plunged the needle into my arm.
