by Mark Latham
In the twisting narrows of Seven Dials, Sir Arthur could not trust to his powers alone; he felt more at ease once he placed a hand on his revolver, transferring it from the holster at his breast to his jacket pocket.
Unlike the streets they had left behind, the alleyway was dead quiet, almost unnaturally so. Ahead, it twisted and turned several times before reaching the next street of the great confluence of the Dials, while overhead a wood-panelled bridge adjoined the flats above the chandler’s shop and the next-door chophouse; or perhaps it supported the two structures, for they leaned into each other like companionable drunkards. A small window overlooked the alley from the bridge, and judging by the foul-smelling slime that ran over the alley’s flagstones, it was used mainly for ejecting the contents of chamber-pots from the meagre dwellings above. Lillian pointed to the window, and Arthur nodded; someone may have seen something, though finding that someone and persuading them to talk would not be easy.
Along the alley, narrow doorways peeked from brick walls—cellar entrances and back doors, and some that must have led to sheltered yards. All were padlocked, or had iron gates fastened across them to keep away opportunistic burglars.
‘They may not have stopped here,’ Lillian said. ‘They could have cut across to the next street.’
‘There’s one way to be sure,’ Arthur replied. Lillian nodded, and delved into her clutch bag, withdrawing a small, greying handkerchief that smelt faintly of rosewater.
Arthur removed his gloves and took the cloth, his other hand outstretched to the darkness, his eyes closed. It had belonged to the girl, and if the unfortunate had ended up the same way as some of the other wretches who had been stolen from the streets of late, the physical link to her would at least lead Arthur to the body.
He could feel Lillian watching him, and blocked out the distraction as best he could. He channelled his thoughts and feelings inward, through his arm, into the cheap handkerchief and back, drawing the very essence of the girl into himself. Arthur took a deep breath, filling every fibre of his being with the etheric vibrations left behind by the girl.
She is dead.
Arthur opened his eyes and looked about. Time had frozen; the alleyway was utterly still. Motes of red dust, which went almost unnoticed in the day-to-day, hung in the air, stationary, glowing like tiny embers. They came from the fire in the sky, and Sir Arthur Furnival had learned some of their mysteries; these particles connected all things, living and dead, and through the use of etherium—what some naively called ‘Crookes’ Nectar’, after its discoverer—he could find anyone or anything by following their trail.
Ahead of him, Lillian Hardwick stood stock-still, a statue of a woman with the colour drained from her, as it was from everything. Everything, that is, except the crimson sky overhead and the glowing particles that fell from it like red snow. The fire in the sky was the only thing that moved, and in this half-life it was more vibrant than ever, clouds of liquid flame billowing and mixing with the firmament like blazing oil atop a lake.
The vividness of the vision came from the etherium. Arthur had known he would be called upon; it was why he was sent. He had injected himself with a single, tiny phial of the stuff in the cab en route to the Dials, despite Lillian’s protests. He had his own orders.
Arthur looked down at himself, at his hands through which the glowing red fire pulsated as the etherium coursed through his veins. It linked him to the energy all around, to the power that was now manifest across the globe, but most tellingly in London. With a great, concentrated effort, he harnessed that power, pulling himself from the faded, frozen tableaux, and stepping from his own body like a moth emerging from its cocoon. He turned back to his own physical form, still and grey, arm outstretched, fist clenched tight around the handkerchief.
Behind his body stood Molly Goodheart.
The apparition wore a simple pale dress and worsted shawl. Her eyes were black orbs, cold and dead. She did not really stand there, but floated inches from the ground, feet hidden by the orange mist that covered the flagstones. Arthur looked down at his own feet rather dumbly, and saw the same. He was as incorporeal now as she.
The ghost of the prostitute drifted past Arthur, passing through his body, through Lillian and onwards along the dark alleyway. It was longer, more twisted, and yet more claustrophobic now than it had been moments earlier. The brick walls seemed to bend inwards, creaking like trees in a forest, forming warped tunnels that branched away in all directions. This was an illusion. Sir Arthur focused again, and the alleyway restored itself to some semblance of normality, albeit a cold, darkened one in this twilight world between worlds. Molly Goodheart’s ghost drifted onwards, shimmering silver in the gloom, twitching and jerking occasionally, no doubt as she struggled to remember that she was no longer flesh and blood.
Arthur followed the spirit along the narrow passage. He would have to be quick, he knew; too long spent away from his body would dull his senses, and leave him open to attack by the Other. He strained his ears to listen for danger. In this realm, the sounds of lost souls reverberated through every stone, were carried on ice-cold breezes, and were felt in the bones. They sounded like muffled cries travelling through water, indistinct and rumbling. But there were other things, too, in the dark realm that Majestics called the ‘Eternal Night’. Chittering, clawing things, native to the void, that were drawn to intruders as to a candle in the darkness. The Other. When these things came, the wise Majestic must flee back to his body, for no amount of etherium could defeat them. To face the Other was to court disaster; to allow gibbering entities ingress to the real world, where only blood would sate their hellish appetites. And so Arthur stayed alert, his mind concentrated on the mission, and his senses stretched outwards, sensitive to the merest danger.
Time flowed differently in the Eternal Night, if indeed it flowed at all. No matter how hard he focused, Sir Arthur could not tell how long he had spent following the spirit. The alleyway seemed to stretch into for ever, and though his feet did not really tread the stones, Arthur began to feel exhausted, as though he had drifted on the orange mist for a lifetime. At last, when he had almost forgotten why he had come to the other realm, the spirit stopped. Arthur saw with growing dread that she was changed; her dress was covered in blood, her arms and face dripping with it. She was barely recognisable.
The spirit stood beside an iron door, and looked towards it with her glassy black eyes. She had showed him the way to the place where she had met her end.
Arthur was about to say something, some parting word to the ghost of Molly Goodheart, but he was interrupted. A jarring, scraping noise rang through the alleyway, coming from all directions. This was not a muffled wave of sound, a deep resonance somewhere on the fringe of Arthur’s senses; this was something close and sharp and threatening. Long fingernails scratching rough brick, teeth gnawing at bone, night creatures calling each other to the hunt.
A boot scraped on stone from somewhere ahead. A figure, dark and unreal, many-armed and many-eyed, began to form itself from the orange mist. Arthur backed away. He turned to address the spirit that had led him here, but she was already gone, now little more than motes of pale dust swirling up to a blood-red sky. Molly Goodheart had returned to the realm of the dead, for she knew what came for them in the Eternal Night.
Come to us, Arthur Furnival.
The voice of the Other scraped at his mind with probing fingers. He fought it, refused to let it in. Arthur began to count backwards from ten, trying to breathe—his body’s breaths—to restore himself to the real world. He could sense, rather than see, the horned thing, the hooved thing, sliding through the shadows ahead.
Ten—nine—eight—
Run along, little human. Little blood-sack. We shall snip-crack your bones and bite-suck the marrow.
Seven—six—
We shall emblazon your world with living fire.
Five—four—
We shall skin-flay you alive and make maggot-palaces of your flesh.
Three—two—
We shall take your woman and claw-gouge her eyes. We shall…
One.
Sir Arthur gulped in the air until he almost choked. Lillian came to him at once, taking his arm in a firm grip.
‘Arthur… that was remarkably quick. Did you find it?’ Her expression was grave.
‘Quick?’ Arthur said. His heart pounded in his chest; his knees almost buckled beneath him.
‘A few seconds at most. Did you see it… the Other?’
Arthur nodded. He could feel the sweat upon his brow, and resisted the temptation to dab it away with the dead girl’s handkerchief. ‘A damn near thing,’ he muttered.
‘It finds you more quickly each time,’ Lillian said, adopting a softer tone. ‘We had best take extra care.’
The feeling of nausea and weakness passed quickly, and Arthur straightened himself. He took two more deep breaths for luck, fiddled with his cravat that he was still certain was tied incorrectly, and led the way up the alley, where he knew he would find an iron door and, somewhere behind it, the body of Molly Goodheart.
FIVE
The passageways seemed endless. John’s lungs burned; the sounds of his own footsteps on slick flagstones rang in his ears. That sound was a comfort, for each time he stopped running he heard the beasts that pursued him calling to each other in the dark.
Logically, John knew there would be another way out of the tunnels; they would not be so long and winding unless they ultimately fed into other parts of the factory site. But whatever was down here with him was stalking his every move, herding him relentlessly into smaller, unlit passages and storerooms. He had heard their scratching steps, their strange chittering calls. Once or twice he fancied he had seen their shadows cast on the walls far behind him. When he had become so angry as to double back and confront his pursuers, there had been nothing there. It had crossed his mind that the Riftborn, those entities that Majestics called ‘the Other’, may have found some way into reality down in these depths. He could not believe that. Even if the Majestic he had confronted earlier were of extraordinary power, the presence of Riftborn would amount to more than just strange sounds in the darkness.
John cleared his mind, trying to push aside thoughts of demons, and of the burning pain that he felt in his ribs. He had to find a way out.
A screech sounded again, so close that he thought something was about to pounce upon his back. He did not even look about, but took flight again, taking a turn into a dark tunnel that he hoped would lead to an exit. He had studied the plans of the factory site back at the safe-house—an inn a few miles south—and knew he should head south-east, to the main yard where surely the tunnels would surface. However, he had been turned about too often, railroaded by the hounds, or demons, or whatever they were. He had no compass, and was purely guessing at the path he should take.
The hateful sounds eventually subsided, and John stopped, doubling over as a stitch and his cracked ribs conspired to cripple him. He straightened to get his bearings, and found that he stood at the mouth of a passage that extended some twelve feet before terminating at a planked door. He cursed; the way back was dangerous, the way ahead uncertain.
He pushed his shoulder hard against the door to move it from its jamb. The damp in the cellar, which seemed worse here, had engorged the old wood, and it put up a struggle before finally relenting with a loud scrape. John struck a precious match and peered into the room.
Steps led down, some distance, too, by the look of them. John would have abandoned the idea of descending as folly had he not seen more electrical cabling protruding from the brick near his head, and trailing off down the stairs. If there were another junction box, he could investigate further. The match was burning low—he had no time to ruminate. John hurried down the steps, and breathed a sigh of relief when he found another lever jutting from the wall. He threw it, and a lonely lightbulb sparked to life, casting the room below in a woefully inadequate yellow glow.
John left the stairs and looked about. It seemed to him that it must be a storeroom for the factory workers’ food, though it had certainly not been put to much use recently. Only one half-empty barrel sat in what was surely the beer store, and the large larder looked as though it had been hastily cleared out. A few mouldy loaves were scattered across the floor, food for the rats.
‘Thank the Lord,’ John muttered. His eyes had alighted on a simple object set down beside a rotting bench, which now offered him more comfort than all the tea in China.
A lantern.
He checked its oil and, finding it sufficient, used the last of his matches to light it.
Beyond the large cellar, John could see another corridor leading off. He moved cautiously along it, wary of the slippery blue-brick floor that sloped gradually downwards as he progressed, until finally the passageway terminated at a large iron gate. As he neared the portal a noisome smell assailed him. John held his handkerchief to his mouth, feeling it wholly inadequate for the task.
On the other side of the gate was a circular chamber, with further passages leading off left and right. Why such a labyrinth would have been built was beyond him, but it seemed old. Wooden detritus lay scattered about, the remains of large packing crates. The cargo, which John could only assume were the mysterious shipments from the paperwork he had found, were revealed, and filled him with a growing dread.
Coffins. When the Majestic upstairs had remonstrated with Hopkirk about his missing caskets, John had not taken him literally. Whatever the strange pair were keeping down here, it was not munitions. And if they had been brought down here, they surely would not have followed the same route as John, for the way was too winding and laborious. John’s spirits brightened, just a little: one of those other passages must lead out.
The lock was stiff, but it was old, and John picked it with relative ease. The gate swung open with a heavy groan. He had no idea if the lock was there to keep intruders out, or to keep something far worse in, but he stepped into the chamber regardless, fighting the rising tide of bile in his throat from the terrible stench.
‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ John muttered to himself.
Water dripped steadily from the high arched ceiling, echoing around the cold cellar. And where it dripped, it mingled with blood and rot, and the slime of decay. The coffins had been wrenched open with force, spilling their contents onto the stone floor. There were no corpses, but the signs—and stench—of their recent occupation was evident. Ragged clothes were scattered about the floor of the chamber with abandon.
From the amount of water running towards an iron grate in the centre of the room, John guessed this would once have been an ice-house.
It occurred to John that perhaps he could find the means to identify the deceased, wherever they might be. The ragged clothes did not look like typical burial suits—murder victims, perhaps? Spies? John could think of little reason to have corpses shipped to a munitions factory in Cheshire. Removing the evidence of a crime? That made some sense; but why not just bury them or, better still, throw them in the huge furnaces next door? And if these poor souls were murdered by the Majestic or his lackeys, when and where had the crimes occurred?
John stooped to pick up what looked like a torn blazer; the War Office crest was unmistakeable over the breast pocket. But once he had taken it up, he instantly recoiled.
In the sleeve of the blazer was part of a human arm, which dropped to the floor with a horrid squelch. John threw the garment back into the pile of filth and wiped his hand hastily on his trousers. When he had recovered his wits, he knelt to inspect the arm. A forearm, severed at the wrist and elbow. It had been torn and gouged, the protruding bone scored with teeth-marks.
‘Think, man…’ John chided himself. Dogs, perhaps. Feral hounds, or even wolves, roaming the tunnels to stop intruders using the maze-like passages to infiltrate the factory; or to dispose of bodies… but he was sure the figure he’d seen earlier had been human, though he had to confess the shadows were playing
tricks with his mind. Better to believe it was a pack of dogs than the alternative. No agent had ever faced the Riftborn directly and lived. To this day, even the Order did not know the demons’ true form, except for descriptions gleaned from the ravings of a few half-mad Majestics who had seen ‘the Other’ in their visions. Rather, if the infernal creatures grew strong enough to manifest themselves, they appeared in myriad ways, depending upon the mental state of the onlooker, and usually with terrible results. If the Riftborn had manifested themselves down here…
No, he couldn’t think about it. Even thinking about them gave them power.
It was unusual for John to be indecisive, and he felt increasingly annoyed with himself. His teachers at the Order’s academy had always taught him that ‘action trumps inaction’. He did not take that mantra quite so literally as his sister, but still…
The thought of Lillian, the notion that he might never see her again should he die down here in the shadows, helped him make a decision. He considered what he had already learned: that these corpses suggested an addition to the already considerable crime of arms smuggling. That powder and lead were being shipped to the factory on a regular basis, and that the factory was fully operational under the watchful gaze of a Majestic. The traitors who might well be selling munitions to foreign powers under the table were also involved in bodysnatching and probably murder.
John’s duty was to report these findings, and not to risk his life. He had been foolish coming here alone. John looked to the two new passages, trying to get a sense of which way would lead to salvation.
A scuff, a scrape, and an ominous, reptilian hiss echoed from the right-hand tunnel.
John breathed a deep sigh, and ran down the left-hand passage as fast as he could.
He rarely found himself without a plan of sorts. Now, his choices were being made for him.
* * *
The squalid slum had been derelict for some time, that much was clear. Lillian scanned the room for any signs of life, but other than a few piles of rags indicative of vagrants, there was nothing.
